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Must I Go parent’s guide: what’s inside
LGBTQ+ themes
Substance use
What it offers
Educational value
A note for parents
This is an adult literary novel centered on an elderly woman's reflections and secrets, including the suicide of a former lover and grief over a daughter's death. While not graphic, the themes are heavy and psychologically mature, requiring emotional sophistication to process. The prose is contemplative rather than sensational, but the subject matter—suicide, family estrangement, complex relationships—makes this suitable for older teens and adults rather than younger readers.
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From the publisher
"One of our major novelists" (Salman Rushdie) tells the story of a woman reflecting on her uncompromising life, and the life of a former lover, in this provocative novel--her first set in America. Lilia Liska is eighty-one. She has shrewdly outlived three husbands, raised five children, and seen the arrival of seventee... "One of our major novelists" (Salman Rushdie) tells the story of a woman reflecting on her uncompromising life, and the life of a former lover, in this provocative novel--her first set in America. Lilia Liska is eighty-one. She has shrewdly outlived three husbands, raised five children, and seen the arrival of seventeen grandchildren. Now she has turned her keen attention to the diary of a long-forgotten man named Roland Bouley, with whom she once had a fleeting affair. Increasingly obsessed by this fragment of intimate history, Lilia begins to annotate the diary with her own rather different version of events. She reveals to us the surprising, long-held secrets of her past. And she returns inexorably to the memory of her daughter, Lucy. This is a novel about life, in all its messy glory. Life lived, for the extraordinary Lilia, absolutely on its own terms. With great candor and insight, Yiyun Li navigates the twin poles of grief and resilience, loss and rebirth, that compass a human heart.
Shelved under
- Fiction
- Romance
- American literature
- New York Times reviewed
- Fiction, family life
- Man-woman relationships
- Suicide victims
- Diaries
- Relations entre hommes et femmes
- Romans, nouvelles
- Suicidés
- Journaux intimes
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ISBN 9780399589126 · Random House Publishing Group