Reading List

Authors Like Yiyun Li

Two girls in a poor village in postwar France invent a book together. Fabienne dictates and Agnès writes it down, and when a local postmaster arranges publication it goes out under Agnès's name alone, because Fabienne wants it that way. Agnès becomes a literary curiosity, is sent to an English finishing school and ends up in a quiet house in Pennsylvania, and only when Fabienne dies, ten years later, does she begin to write again. The Book of Goose (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, September 2022, 348 pages) won the PEN/Faulkner Award in 2023 and was named a best book of the year almost everywhere. Li was born in Beijing in 1972, served in the People's Liberation Army as a student, came to Iowa in 1996 to study immunology and abandoned science for writing in a language she took up as an adult and has said she chose deliberately over Chinese. She has published ten books, holds a MacArthur Fellowship and teaches at Princeton. Two of them — Where Reasons End and a 2025 memoir — come out of the deaths of her two sons. The ten below are chosen on precision, on distance, and on the decision to write in an acquired language.

By Lisanne Swart · 10 authors · Literary fiction · A chosen language · PEN/Faulkner 2023 · Updated September 2026

Quick answer

If you love Yiyun Li, the closest match is William Trevor, the writer she has spent decades reading and teaching, whose stories turn on a single quiet irreversible thing. Elena Ferrante is the comparison reviewers made for The Book of Goose and it holds. Anita Brookner is the nearest on austerity, Ha Jin and Jhumpa Lahiri on writing in a chosen language, and Han Kang and Sigrid Nunez on cold prose about unbearable things. Ocean Vuong is the argument against: the same material, written hot.

Every book by Yiyun Li →

10 authors like Yiyun Li

01
The writer she keeps returning to · Closest match

William Trevor

Irish · The Story of Lucy Gault (2002), Love and Summer (2009), the collected stories

Trevor wrote around a hundred short stories over fifty years, mostly about Irish and English people whose lives turn on something small and irreversible — a letter not sent, a misunderstanding at a gate, a marriage entered into for want of anything else. He was shortlisted for the Booker Prize five times without winning, published into his late eighties, and died in 2016. The collected stories run well past a thousand pages.

The writer Li has read, taught and written about for decades, and the influence is structural rather than atmospheric. Both build a story around a withheld fact and a character who has decided not to feel something, both refuse to raise the volume at the moment a lesser writer would, and both are interested in people who go on living quietly after the thing that ruined them. Trevor is warmer. Read three of the stories and you will hear it.

— Lisanne

Every book by William Trevor →

02
The comparison the reviews made

Elena Ferrante

Italian · My Brilliant Friend (2011) and the Neapolitan Quartet, The Lying Life of Adults (2019)

The Neapolitan novels follow Elena and Lila from a poor Naples neighbourhood in the 1950s through sixty years of friendship, rivalry, marriages, politics and writing, with one girl escaping through education and the other staying. Ferrante is a pseudonym and the author's identity has never been confirmed. HBO adapted the quartet across four seasons.

The comparison almost every review of The Book of Goose reached for, and it is exact rather than lazy: two girls in a poor place, one dominant and one recording, a book that emerges from the pair and is credited to one of them, and a lifetime spent working out who was using whom. Ferrante is hotter, longer and more forgiving of her characters. Li does it in three hundred and forty pages and lets nobody off.

— Lisanne
Every book by Elena Ferrante →
03
The austerity

Anita Brookner

British · Hotel du Lac (1984), Look at Me (1983)

Brookner was an art historian, the first woman to hold the Slade professorship at Cambridge, who began publishing novels at fifty-three and then produced roughly one a year for a quarter of a century. Hotel du Lac, about a romantic novelist sent to a Swiss hotel after doing something socially unforgivable, won the Booker Prize in 1984. Her subject is almost always a solitary, watchful, intelligent woman and the small compromises she declines to make. She died in 2016.

The nearest match for what Li's sentences actually do. Reviewers reached for Brookner's quietly dramatic prose when The Book of Goose appeared, and the resemblance is real: controlled, unornamented, faintly formal, and far more devastating than the surface admits. Both write women who have decided that describing their own feelings would be a kind of collapse. If you value the coolness in Li above everything, start with Look at Me.

— Lisanne
04
The other writer who chose English

Ha Jin

Chinese-American · Waiting (1999), War Trash (2004)

Ha Jin was born in Liaoning in 1956, joined the People's Liberation Army at fourteen, came to the United States for graduate study and decided to stay after 1989, writing in English from then on. Waiting, about an army doctor who spends eighteen years trying to divorce the wife his family chose for him, won the National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award. War Trash won a second PEN/Faulkner. He teaches at Boston University.

The closest parallel to Li's central decision, and the most instructive one. Both were born in China, both served in the army, both came to America for something other than literature, and both chose to write in English rather than Chinese — and both have said the choice was about what the acquired language keeps out. Ha Jin is plainer still and more directly political. Read Waiting.

— Lisanne
05
The same decision, in Italian

Jhumpa Lahiri

American · Interpreter of Maladies (1999), Whereabouts (2021)

Lahiri won the Pulitzer Prize for her first collection, stories about Bengali families in New England and Calcutta, and then, after four books in English, moved to Rome, learned Italian and began writing in it. Dove mi trovo (2018) is a novel about a woman walking through an unnamed Italian city, which she translated into English herself three years later as Whereabouts. She also translates Domenico Starnone and directs the creative writing programme at Barnard.

The other great contemporary example of a writer choosing a language rather than inheriting one, arrived at from the opposite direction: Li left her first language behind, and Lahiri left the language she was praised in. Both describe the same benefit, which is that the acquired language will not let you be fluent enough to be sentimental. Read Whereabouts, which is the most Li-like thing she has written.

— Lisanne
Every book by Jhumpa Lahiri →

Authors like Jhumpa Lahiri →

06
Cold prose, unbearable subject

Han Kang

South Korean · The Vegetarian (2007), Human Acts (2014), We Do Not Part (2021)

The Vegetarian is told in three parts by people around a woman who stops eating meat after a dream and then keeps going, and none of them by her; Deborah Smith's translation won the International Booker Prize in 2016. Human Acts concerns the Gwangju uprising of 1980 and its dead. Han received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2024, the first Korean writer to do so.

The same method against a subject that would justify shouting: a flat, exact prose that describes violence, refusal and grief without raising itself once, so that the reader supplies the horror. Han is more formally experimental and works with the body where Li works with speech. If you value Li because she never tells you how to feel, this is the same discipline in another language.

— Lisanne
Every book by Han Kang →

Authors like Han Kang →

07
Grief, written dry

Sigrid Nunez

American · The Friend (2018), What Are You Going Through (2020), The Vulnerables (2023)

The Friend is narrated by a woman who inherits a Great Dane from a friend who has died, in a small New York apartment where dogs are not allowed, and moves between the dog, the dead man and a long argument about writing; it won the National Book Award in 2018 and was filmed in 2024 with Naomi Watts and Bill Murray. What Are You Going Through concerns a friend who has decided how her illness will end.

The nearest American equivalent in temperature. Nunez writes bereavement and mortality in short essayistic sections, with jokes about literature and no request for sympathy, which is close to what Li does in her most personal work. Both are suspicious of catharsis as a literary effect. Nunez is the more conversational of the two and the easier place to start.

— Lisanne
Every book by Sigrid Nunez →
08
The impersonal first person

Rachel Cusk

British · Outline (2014), Parade (2024), Life of M (2026)

The Outline trilogy is narrated by a woman who barely speaks while other people tell her their lives at length and expose themselves in the telling; her name is withheld for most of the first book. Cusk arrived at the form after two memoirs drew hostility she has described as creative death. Parade won the Goldsmiths Prize in 2024 and Life of M appeared this autumn.

The other major contemporary solution to the same problem: how to keep a self on the page without confessing. Cusk empties the narrator and lets other people fill the book; Li keeps the narrator but denies her the vocabulary of feeling. Both have been called cold by readers who mean it as a criticism and by admirers who mean it as praise. Read Outline after The Book of Goose.

— Lisanne
Every book by Rachel Cusk →

Authors like Rachel Cusk →

09
Older than the genre · The one she named a book after

Katherine Mansfield

New Zealand · Bliss and Other Stories (1920), The Garden Party (1922)

Mansfield left New Zealand for London at nineteen and wrote the stories that changed the English short story: a garden party interrupted by a death in the lane below, a woman at a party realising what her husband is, a family holiday rendered almost entirely in overheard speech. She died of tuberculosis in 1923, at thirty-four, leaving journals and letters that have been read ever since as a second body of work.

The title of Li's essay collection, Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life, is a line from Mansfield's notebooks, which tells you how close the relationship is. Mansfield is where the modern story learned to end without resolving, to leave the important thing unsaid, and to trust an object or a gesture to carry it. Read “The Garden Party” and then a Li story, and the inheritance is plain.

— Lisanne
Every book by Katherine Mansfield →
10
The argument against her

Ocean Vuong

American · Night Sky with Exit Wounds (2016), On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous (2019), The Emperor of Gladness (2025)

Vuong was born in Saigon in 1988 and came to Hartford, Connecticut, as a small child. On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous is a letter from a son to a mother who cannot read it, covering the Vietnam War, a nail salon, a farm labourer he loved and the opioid crisis, written in prose that keeps turning into poetry. He received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2019 and teaches at New York University.

The same material at the opposite temperature, and the fairest objection to Li that exists. Both write migration, a mother, a language acquired rather than inherited, and a family history that will not be spoken about — and Vuong writes it hot, lyrical, unguarded and openly grieving, where Li writes it cold and holds every sentence back. Readers who find Li austere to the point of withholding should read him, and then decide which restraint is honesty and which is armour.

— Lisanne
Every book by Ocean Vuong →

Authors like Ocean Vuong →

Where to start if you loved Yiyun Li

If you want the closest match, read William Trevor.

The collected stories. Fifty years of lives turning on something very small.

If you loved The Book of Goose, read Elena Ferrante.

My Brilliant Friend. Two girls, one poor neighbourhood, and sixty years of it.

If you want the same coolness, read Anita Brookner.

Look at Me. A watchful woman who will not describe her own feelings.

If you want the same language decision, read Ha Jin.

Waiting. Eighteen years of an army doctor's divorce, in his second language.

If you want the argument against her, read Ocean Vuong.

On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous. The same subjects, written hot.

If you want more novels of this kind

My shelf of the best fiction has the rest.

Frequently asked questions about authors like Yiyun Li

Who should I read if I love Yiyun Li?

William Trevor is the closest, and the writer she has read and taught for decades. Elena Ferrante is the comparison the reviews made for The Book of Goose, and Anita Brookner the nearest match for the austerity of the prose. Ha Jin and Jhumpa Lahiri both chose the language they write in, as she did. Han Kang and Sigrid Nunez write unbearable material at the same low temperature, and Rachel Cusk solves the same problem of how to write a self without confessing. Katherine Mansfield gave one of Li's books its title. Ocean Vuong is the argument against.

Which Yiyun Li book should I start with?

The Book of Goose (2022), which won the PEN/Faulkner Award and is the most propulsive thing she has written: two girls in postwar rural France, a book they invent together, and a lifetime of working out who used whom. If you would rather start with stories, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers (2005) won the Frank O'Connor and the PEN/Hemingway awards. Must I Go (2020) is the most formally interesting of the novels, built around an old woman annotating a dead lover's diaries.

Why does she write in English?

By choice, and she has been unusually direct about it. She came to Iowa in 1996 to do a graduate degree in immunology, having grown up in Beijing and served as a student in the People's Liberation Army, and she began writing in English as an adult. She has described the decision as a private one and has largely declined to write in Chinese since, including refusing to have her own work translated into it for a long period. The acquired language keeps a certain fluency, and a certain sentimentality, out of reach.

What is Where Reasons End about?

A mother in conversation with a son who has died — sixteen chapters of dialogue between them, in a space outside time, arguing about words, precision and what a parent is entitled to say. It won the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award in 2019. Li's two sons died, and a memoir published in 2025 concerns both. They are extraordinary books and they are not the place to begin; read the fiction first, and come to them knowing what they are.

Is The Book of Goose really like Ferrante?

Genuinely, yes, and unusually so for a jacket comparison. Both take two girls in a poor rural or working-class place, one of whom dominates and one of whom records, and follow the consequences of a book that comes out of the pair and is credited to one. Both are finally about what a friendship of that kind takes from each side. The differences are scale and heat: Ferrante writes four volumes and lets her characters rage, Li writes three hundred and forty pages and lets almost nothing be said aloud.

Is Yiyun Li writing a new book?

Nothing further has been announced as of September 2026. She has published ten books since 2005, including the story collection Wednesday's Child (2023) and a memoir in 2025, and she teaches at Princeton and is a contributing editor at A Public Space. Her output has been steady rather than gapped, so another is likely rather than imminent.

Is her writing depressing?

It is bleak in subject and extremely controlled in manner, which most readers find bracing rather than crushing — there is no wallowing, because the prose refuses it. What people do find difficult is the withholding: characters decline to explain themselves, endings do not resolve, and sympathy is never solicited. If that is the wrong register for you, Ferrante and Ocean Vuong cover much of the same ground with the feeling left in.

What order should I read her in?

Any order — ten separate books, no sequence. A workable route: The Book of Goose (2022), then the stories in A Thousand Years of Good Prayers (2005), then The Vagrants (2009), her novel of a small Chinese city after a public execution in 1979. Then the essays in Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life (2017), which are about reading, and only then the two books about her sons.

Nothing here was suggested by a machine. I picked these ten myself, and the reasons are on the page.

Written by Lisanne Swart, who has curated reading lists and author guides at lisanneswart.com since 2021. See more on her personal bookshelf.

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“I live like my geese.”

— Yiyun Li, The Book of Goose, 2022.

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