‘Fans of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan trilogy won’t be disappointed, but the comparison undermines the skill with which Li tells her story, peeling back the layers to reveal the dark truths at the heart of Agnes and Fabienne’s friendship’ Marie Claire

‘[Li] has become … one of our finest living authors: Her elegant metaphysics never elide the blood and maggots … The most propulsively entertaining of Li’s novels… an existential fable that illuminates the tangle of motives behind our writing of stories’ New York Times

‘Beguiling … A shimmering, unsettling tale of exploitation and manipulation’ Daily Mail

‘These two perverse, dangerous, glorious girls are their own creation and their own destiny, captured in the high noon of their lives’ Observer New Review

‘Resonant with echoes of… My Brilliant Friend, as well as authors including Elizabeth Strout and William Trevor … For all its surface lushness, this is a novel of meticulous philosophical inquiry’ Observer

‘Brilliant … A novel of deceptions and cruelty’ Spectator

‘Dazzling, subtle, skilful … I loved it’ Charlotte Mendelson, author of The Exhibitionist

‘In a story about love and creation, Yiyun Li slips in a satire of the business of marketing authors… deft and delicious’ Rowan Hisayo Buchanan, author of Starling Days

‘Yiyun Li has, again, done something new and gone somewhere wonderfully strange and alive. Beautiful, sad, funny and claustrophobic’ Jon McGregor, author of Lean Fall Stand

‘A haunting novel about loss, friendship and storytelling … Few writers match Yiyun Li’s ability to explore human desire and ambition’ Tash Aw, author of Strangers on a Pier

‘Meet Agnès and Fabienne…Come for the writerly scheming, stay for the exquisitely calibrated examination of how our most tender and important bonds involve the manipulation of power and devotion’ LA Times