'Extraordinary, challenging and...thrilling'. * Belfast Telegraph *
'Extraordinary, challenging and...thrilling...So simple, so heartbreaking, so very, very good'. * Independent *
'A tragedy-bound love story with a gritty contemporary setting...Lish's matter-of-fact style somehow manages to elevate the everyday and urban into an art form...There is an echo here of T. S. Eliot or...The Great Gatsby'. * Third Way Magazine *
'Deeply moving' * Carnegie Europe *
'A raw, sharply rendered love story, a stark portrayal of New York, an unsparing autopsy of the Bush years, and as ambitious and impressive a debut as you could wish for'. * Irish Times *
'Atticus Lish is a writer on a stratospheric rise, and rightly so...the book is getting plenty of attention for all the right reasons' * Irish Independent *
'A fine novel' -- David Nicholls * Observer *
'[An] unfailingly vivid and engaged portrait of life on the margins of society' * Financial Times Books of 2015 *
'This book is a masterwork.' * Alan Warner, author of Morvern Callar *
`Punches its way, bare-knuckled, through every millennial New York novel centring around middle-class intellectual characters... kicking typical tales of artsy, east-coast intelligentsia romance into a dumpster. But its real target, sought out with a heat-seeking precision, is far weightier, and that is America itself' * Observer *
`Powerful... Lish writes with rare confidence... he doesn't forget that a good love story should break your heart' * Metro *
`Extraordinary... "Make it new" was Ezra Pound's exhortation... Lish does exactly that... astonishing... nothing less than a triumph, worthy of every heroic adjective a critic could throw. It is a reminder, plain and simple, of what fiction is for' * FT *
`Will pull you in... completely compelling and persuasive... a New York which you won't read about that often... poetic... there's a beautiful exactness' * RTE *
`A blistering novel... bigger than the sum of its parts. I can think of no better recent fiction book to read as the presidential election circuit gears up.' * The Times *
`Importan[t]...Lish excels at dialogue' * Literary Review *
'Here is a raw first novel with a low center of gravity. Set in Queens, it dilates upon blinkered lives, scummy apartments, dismal food and bad options. At its heart is a love story between a Chinese immigrant and a veteran of the Iraq war. Mr. Lish's narrative is intense, moving and somehow necessary.' -- Dwight Garner * New York Times, 2014 Books of the Year *
`Impressive.. Charged with breathless momentum... substantial and beguiling...This is, in the end, a profoundly political book' * Guardian *
`Extraordinarily powerful... The burning intensity of the prose... fully absorbs all the detail... Lish's remarkable debut fuses raw realism with narrative poetry to truly memorable effect' * Sunday Times *
`A significant contribution... striking... [Lish] isn't catching a mood but building a world... we look to long novels for richness, not perfection, for power, not precision, so we should savour Lish's audacity and open heart, his refusal to coddle or console' * Daily Telegraph *
`Magnificent... one of the best recent novels I have read about work as it exists for millions of people... attests to a more profound and intimate knowledge of how life functions on the margins' * New Statesman *
`Astonishing, gorgeous... It is hard to imagine a more daunting task for a novelist than to say something new about 9/11. Preparation for the Next Life is dizzying in its ambition and exhilarating in its triumph.' Clancy Martin, -- Clancy Martin * New York Review of Books *
`The finest and most unsentimental love story of the new decade.' * New York Times *
`A tremendous book, relentless, moving, written in prose of marvellous integrity. Now that America and the novel are dead, I hope we can have more great American novels as alive as this one.' * Sam Lipsyte, author of The Ask *
`A tour de force of urban naturalism... a love story that's as bold and urgent as any you'll read this year.' -- Sam Sacks * Wall Street Journal *
`A stunning debut novel... Lish's prose is at once raw and disciplined, and every word feels necessary.' * Publishers Weekly *
`The most relevant, and beautiful, novel of the year.' * Scott McClanahan, author of Crapalachia and Hill William *
