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A review by mariomenti
A Thousand Years of Good Prayers by Yiyun Li
5.0
One thing I love is going to charity shops and look through their fiction books, just to see if there's something there that looks like I'd enjoy it. Very often this is the way I come across an author I've not heard before, and often it's books that were up for an award a few years ago, but that I've missed.
Yiyun Li's collection of short stories "A Thousand Years Of Good Prayers" is one such book I absolutely loved. Beautifully spare, it tells the story (and history) of modern China through the protagonists' "insignificant" (to history) lives. At times wickedly humorous, but more than anything utterly heartbreaking in their honesty, these are stories that will stay with me. And it feels like it shines a light onto the complex history of modern China more than any other fiction book I've read recently.
Yiyun Li's collection of short stories "A Thousand Years Of Good Prayers" is one such book I absolutely loved. Beautifully spare, it tells the story (and history) of modern China through the protagonists' "insignificant" (to history) lives. At times wickedly humorous, but more than anything utterly heartbreaking in their honesty, these are stories that will stay with me. And it feels like it shines a light onto the complex history of modern China more than any other fiction book I've read recently.