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|title=Kinder Than Solitude

|author=Yiyun Li

|publisher=Fourth Estate

|date=March 2014

|website=http://www.yiyunli.com/

|summary=A beautifully written, dark and ultimately quite sad story of how an event in their childhood affects four young Chinese people. It is heartbreaking at times but the quality of the prose is sublime.

}}

Yiyun Li's ''Kinder Than Solitude'' opens with a death but the story goes back much further than that. When orphaned Ruyu arrives in Beijing to stay with a distant relation to go to school, she finds herself sharing a bedroom with the rebellious Shaoai and going to school with the serious Moran and her friend Boyang. Ruyu is not an easy character and her arrival seems to disrupt everyone's lives even though Moran and Boyang look after her. However an 'accident' changes everything. All four of them live with the consequences of what happened either physically or mentally. Moran and Ruyu both leave China and settle in the US, while Boyang and Shaoai stay in China. The book switches between the events of the past and the present.