Where Reasons End, the sixth book by the Chinese-American author Yiyun Li, contains many heartbreaking moments, but the saddest occurs in its dedication: ‘in memory of Vincent Kean Li (2001–2017)’. It’s impossible to read this story of an unnamed Chinese-American author reckoning with the suicide of her sixteen-year-old son except in the shadow cast by those words and those painfully abbreviated dates. Just a few months have passed since the boy’s death, but for his mother time no longer means what it used to: ‘The days he had refused would come, one at a time. Neither my allies nor my enemies, they would wait, every daybreak, with their boundless patience and indifference, seeing if they could turn me into a friend or an enemy to myself.’

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