Pulitzer winner Yiyun Li channels grief into "Music Against the Night," first novel of a planned trilogy

Yiyun Li has written everything she knows about life into her new novel "Music Against the Night," the first book in a planned trilogy about 19th-century musicians Adelaide "Percherette" Percheron and John Field.

Li, a MacArthur and Guggenheim fellow and Robert F. Goheen Professor in the Humanities at Princeton University, won the 2026 Pulitzer Prize for memoir for "Things in Nature Merely Grow," published in 2025. That book chronicled the aftermath of her sons' deaths by suicide as teenagers. She dedicated her new novel to their memory—Vincent and James.

"Music Against the Night" reimagines the unlikely meeting in 1807 Moscow of an orphan from Pondicherry in French colonial India and a musical genius from Dublin. The novel explores childhood, loneliness, music, and grief. Li said she felt she had written everything she knows into it.

The genesis came during the pandemic lockdown in March 2020, when Li and her friend Edmund White began a book club of two. White, who died in 2025, was the author of "A Boy's Own Story," a pioneering figure in gay literature, and celebrated biographer of Genet, Proust, and Rimbaud. The two spoke daily for 30 minutes about what they were reading, eventually working through 120 books together.

"I always say I met John Field in 2022, when Edmund and I read Tolstoy's 'Childhood,'" Li recalled. In that autobiographical novel, she learned that Countess Tolstoya's son Leo wrote feelingly about his mother playing her teacher John Field's nocturnes on the piano.

It was Percherette who drew Li to write the story. Historical records gave her only a few paragraphs—no more than five—about this young woman, a prodigy and an orphan. "I thought, 'This young woman, a prodigy and an orphan, deserves to be written.'" Though Li read extensively about French colonial India in the 1800s, discovering the lives of smart, multilingual young local women who often married white men, she emphasized: "The entire Percherette storyline is my fiction. My creation."

When writing the novel, a friend suggested Li was spending too much time on the characters as children and should provide them with a pivotal experience to launch them into adulthood. Li bristled at the suggestion. "I was so resentful of that approach, because what matters to me is what they came from," she said. "And these were extraordinary children, and they were not always understood. But they could feel profoundly about their life."