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The story of Preparation for the Next Life is one of lovers battling against the odds: a Chinese Muslim immigrant, Zou Lei, and a traumatised Iraq veteran, Brad Skinner, attempt to forge a relationship in New York while struggling with the problems of one of them being in the country illegally, post-traumatic stress disorder and worse. The success of the novel lies in the way that, within this slow-burning fairy-tale structure, Atticus Lish relentlessly depicts the scale of those odds and vividly examines the lives of those outside the United States' social safety net. The narrative in Preparation for the Next Life is full of movement, and the prose compulsively conveys the sensory impressions and social interactions of life in the city. As well as being a raw and sharply rendered love story, this is a stark portrayal of immigration, an autopsy of the degradations of the Bush years, and as ambitious and impressive a first novel as you could hope to find.
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