Friends of Montclair Library

On Tuesday, July 15 at 6:30pm, award-winning writer Yiyun Li will read from and discuss her latest novel, Kinder than Solitude, at the Montclair Branch Library. A Great Good Place for Books will provide copies of Kinder than Solitude for sale and signing afterwards.

Ms. Li’s newest work moves back and forth in time between America today and China in the 1990s. It features the story of three people whose lives become forever haunted by a murder that one of them may have committed in the past. Booklist writes: “Li’s fourth work of fiction gives the trappings of a murder mystery with none of the dull formula. Instead, she burrows deeply into the minds of her characters. Her prose, by turns sumptuous and austere, is utterly precise…A brilliant, sorrowful, and unpredictable novel.”

The author of such previously acclaimed titles as A Thousand Years of Good Prayers and The Vagrants, Yiyun Li grew up in Beijing and immigrated to the United States in 1996. She has received a number of awards, including a 2010 MacArthur Foundation Fellow, Whiting Award and Lannan Foundation Residency Fellow, among others. She was named by Granta as one of the 21 Best Young American Novelists under 35, and was named by The New Yorker as one of the top 20 writers under 40. She currently resides in Oakland and teaches at the University of California, Davis.

This free community event is being co-sponsored by the Friends of the Montclair Branch Library and the Oakland Public Library.