• Wednesday’s Child

  • By: Yiyun Li
  • Narrated by: Yiyun Li
  • Length: 9 hrs and 38 mins

Prime logo Prime members: New to Audible?
Get 2 free audiobooks during trial.
Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, and podcasts.
Access exclusive sales and deals.
Premium Plus auto-renews for $14.95/mo after 30 days. Cancel anytime.
Wednesday’s Child  By  cover art

Wednesday’s Child

By: Yiyun Li
Narrated by: Yiyun Li
Try for $0.00

$14.95/month after 30 days. Cancel anytime.

Buy for $24.67

Buy for $24.67

Pay using card ending in
By confirming your purchase, you agree to Audible's Conditions of Use and Amazon's Privacy Notice. Taxes where applicable.

Publisher's summary

A dazzling collection of short stories, spanning 15 years of writing, from Yiyun Li, the prize-winning author of The Book of Goose and Where Reasons End

This edition includes an audio-only bonus story, Call me Ishmael’s Mother.

A grieving mother makes a spreadsheet of everyone she’s lost. A professor develops a troubled intimacy with her hairdresser. And every year, a restless woman receives an email from a strange man twice her age and several states away. In Yiyun Li’s stories, people strive for an ordinary existence until doing so becomes unsustainable, until the surface cracks and grand mysterious forces – death, violence, estrangement – come to light. And even everyday life is laden with meaning, studded with indelible details: a filched jar of honey, a mound of wounded ants, a photograph kept hidden for many years, until it must be seen.

Li is a breathtakingly original writer, an alchemist of opposites: tender and unsentimental, metaphysical and blunt, funny and horrifying, omniscient and yet acutely aware of just how much we cannot know. Beloved for her novels and memoirs, she returns here to her earliest form, gathering short stories and a remarkable novella never before published in the UK. Taken together, the stories in Wednesday's Child articulate the true cost of living with all Li’s trademark unnerving beauty and searing wisdom.

©2023 Yiyun Li (P)2023 HarperCollins Publishers Limited

Critic reviews

‘One of our major novelists’ Salman Rushdie

‘One of our finest living authors’ New York Times

What listeners say about Wednesday’s Child

Average customer ratings

Reviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.