Preparation For The Next Life

“Perhaps the finest and most unsentimental love story of the new decade.”
-The New York Times

“As bold and urgent a love story as you’ll read this year.”
-The Wall Street Journal

• Winner of the 2015 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction
• Winner of the New York City Book Award for Fiction
• Finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award for Fiction
• Winner of the 2014 Carla Furstenberg Cohen Prize for Fiction
• New York Times Best of 2014
• Wall Street Journal's Best of 2014
• Vanity Fair's Best of 2014
• Publishers Weekly's Best of 2014
• BuzzFeed's Best of 2014

Skinner hitchhikes to New York, newly returned from Iraq, hoping to exorcise his demons. Zou Lei, an undocumented immigrant from Central Asia, catches a bus into the city, searching for a way to get by—or at least stay out of jail. Their unlikely love story becomes the heart of one of the most compelling and widely acclaimed novels in years.

A clear-eyed illustration of life in New York City's margins, Preparation For the Next Life evokes the unsettling realities of the American Dream for U.S. immigrants and unsupported veterans in stark, vivid detail. At once a nightmare and a love letter to New York City (a place one loves partly for its host of nightmares), Lish's prose is disciplined yet always alive and taut with danger, rendered with the voice of a new and natural talent.