iyun Li has made something miraculous out of choosing to write not in her mother tongue, Mandarin Chinese, but in her adopted English. She moved to the US from Beijing with her husband in 1996, when she was 23, and has made her home there ever since. Inside the traditions of English prose, the writers she loves include Thomas Hardy, Katherine Mansfield, William Trevor and John McGahern, and you can feel this in the plain music of her style, the rich surprises of her perception, her relish for the
