Preparation for the Next Life

Winner of the 2015 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction

A gut-wrenching love story between an illegal migrant from the Uyghur tribe in Asia and a damaged Iraq veteran set in the underbelly of New York.

Zou Lei is an illegal immigrant who works at a Chinese restaurant in Queens in search of a better life in the Land of the Brave. Brad Skinner has recently arrived in New York following a tour in Iraq and is determined to party as hard as he can in order to start 'wanting to live again'. When their paths cross, they discover that new starts may be possible for both of them, if they can survive homelessness, lockup and Skinner's posttraumatic stress disorder, which may be more prophecy than madness.

Set in the underbelly of New York, Preparation for the Next Life extols 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.