by Atticus Lish (Author)
Winner of the PEN/Faulkner Prize 2015
Winner of the 2015 Paris Review Plimpton Prize for Fiction
In post-9/11 New York, Zou Lei is an illegal immigrant from northwest China. A Muslim with a Uighur mother and a Han soldier for a father, she's a pariah even within the Chinese community. Forced to work fourteen-hour days and live in squalor, she nevertheless embraces the many freedoms her adopted homeland has to offer.
Damaged by three tours in Iraq, veteran Brad Skinner comes to New York with the sole intention of partying as hard as he can in order to forget what he's seen. Impulsive and angry, Skinner's re-entry into civilian life seems doomed. But when he meets Zou Lei they discover that new beginnings may be possible for both of them, that is if they can survive homelessness, lockup and Skinner's post-traumatic stress disorder.
Set in the underbelly of New York, Preparation for the Next Life exposes an America as seen from the fringes of society in devastating detail and destroys the myth of the American Dream through two of the most remarkable characters in contemporary fiction. Powerful, realistic and raw, this is one of the most ambitious - and necessary - chronicles of our time.
Format: Hardcover
Pages: 432
Publisher: Oneworld Publications
Published: 02 Apr 2015
ISBN 10: 1780747772
ISBN 13: 9781780747774
Book Overview: 'An instantly immersive, atmospheric book, a love story and a gripping chronicle of the concealed purgatories of New York City, and the world. Mr Lish's prose is superlucid, propulsive but always beautifully controlled, authoritative yet selfless, wrought with an exactitude that is the toughest but deepest kind of compassion a book can have.' -- Colin Barrett, author of Young Skins 'Ferocious and immense, this book will break your heart.' -- Niall Griffiths 'Devastatingly good. My heart was a different size by the time I finished: swollen from the terrible beating it took, but also, I think, permanently augmented.' -- Ned Beauman 'Here's the kind of book that shows up, if we're lucky, every five, maybe ten years. It's a book that masterfully anchors itself in the literary novel form while going leaps and bounds over a dozen of its kin in its authenticity, Lish's command of the sentence capturing a dizzyingly accurate worldview from street level and up.' Electric Literature