Preparation for the Next Life

Preparation for the Next Life is very much about this life, as lived in the blind tunnel of poverty and illegality traveled by Zou Lei, a young Uighur woman who has made her way from western China, via Mexico, to Queens, where she grabs a tiny foothold and connects with a soldier back from Iraq. Lish embeds you so thoroughly in the details of their existence—the food-court steam tables, the bodybuilding magazines, the KFC respites—that you believe there's no world beyond what necessity has limited them to, even as Zou Lei's fierce will pushes against those limits at every turn. It's a remarkable debut novel.