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Private tragedies: Must I Go, by Yiyun Li, reviewed

15 August 2020

9:00 AM

15 August 2020

9:00 AM

Must I Go Yiyun Li

Hamish Hamilton, pp.368, 16.99

I can think of few novels as bleak or dispiriting as Yiyun Li’s 2009 debut, The Vagrants. Set in a Chinese industrial town in 1979, it opens with one woman’s death and closes with another. The pages in between are jammed with misery meted out by scalpel: treacherous friends, underfed children, craven officials, all have their turn upon the stage, while school choirs sing unfalteringly in praise of the communist party.

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