Atticus Lish is an American novelist whose debut work achieved unexpected success and garnered multiple awards. His prose often delves into the depths of human experience, exploring themes of survival and identity. Lish's distinctive style is marked by its raw honesty and piercing insight into the world around us. His writing offers readers an intense and unforgettable experience.
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 post-traumatic stress disorder, which may be more prophecy than madness.
"From the author of the PEN/Faulkner winning debut novel Preparation for the Next Life--a searing, tender, haunting story about fathers and sons, sons and mothers, and a young boy's struggle to become a man. Corey Goltz is fifteen years old when his mother, Gloria, is diagnosed with ALS. Estranged from his father, and increasingly responsible for meeting both his mother's needs and his own, Corey is determined to be the hero Gloria needs --at any cost. But when his father Leonard re-enters the picture, Corey's beliefs--about honor and love, duty and devotion, and the uses and misuses of power--are sorely tested. Charismatic and cruel, Leonard is a man of outsize influence and dubious moral character, a man whose neglect of his wife and son amounts to a kind of barbarism. The closer Corey gets to understanding his father's role in their family, the closer he comes to unmasking a violence that is beyond even his worst imaginings. Set against the backdrop of a small town in Massachusetts in the early 2000s, where the working class world collides with the professional and academic worlds of nearby Boston and Cambridge, The War For Gloria tells the story of a young man straddling childhood and adulthood, whose yearning to protect his mother requires him to dismantle the myth of--and possibly destroy--his father. A gripping, indelible work from a fearless new voice in American fiction"--
