Synopses & Reviews
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
Zou Lei, orphan of the desert, migrates to work in America and finds herself slaving in New York's kitchens. She falls in love with a young man whose heart has been broken in another desert. A new life may be possible if together they can survive homelessness, lockup, and the young man's nightmares, which may be more prophecy than madness.
Review
"Perhaps the finest and most unsentimental love story of the new decade." The New York Times
Review
"As bold and urgent a love story as you'll read this year." Wall Street Journal
Review
"A sledgehammer to the American dream." Kirkus Reviews
Review
"One of the most acclaimed debut novelists of the year." New York Observer
Review
"Preparation for the Next Life, by Atticus Lish, is an astounding first novel about a world so large there is, sometimes, nowhere to go; a world so small the people in it, sometimes, get lost. The book has the boundless, epic exhilaration you expect to find only in a writer as mighty as, say, Walt Whitman." The New York Review of Books
Review
"Lovely and soft, tragic and cutting...maybe the most surprising novel of the year, for the authors sudden, astounding appearance on the scene, yes, but more for the temporal details matched succeeded by glowing tenderness." Vanity Fair
Review
Not since Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain have such arduously yearning treks been made through maddening, heartbreaking obstructions in the name of love.” New York Journal of Books
About the Author
Atticus Lish lives in New York.