"Lilia Liska has shrewdly outlived three husbands, raised five children, and seen the arrival of seventeen grandchildren. Now she has turned her keen attention to the diary of a man named Roland Bouley, with whom she once had an affair--the man who was the father of her daughter Lucy. Lilia tells her rather different version of events revealing the surprising, long-held secrets of her past. And she returns inexorably to her daughter, Lucy, who took her own life at the age of twenty-seven. This is a novel about life in all its messy glory--life lived, for the extraordinary Lilia, absolutely on her own terms. With great candor and insight, Yiyun Li writes of a life of resilience, loss and rebirth"--