Zou Lei is an illegal immigrant from the Chinese province of Xinjiang, daughter of a Uighur mother and a Han father.
While struggling to survive in New York's underground economy, Zou Lei meets Skinner, who is suffering from untreated combat trauma.
Their attempts to build a life together, overcoming the violence, predation, and alienation surrounding them, amount to what Times critic Dwight Garner has called "perhaps the finest and most unsentimental love story of the new decade".
[4] The judges of the 2015 PEN/Faulkner Award praised the book for its blend of documentary detail and "incantation," stating that it "scours and illuminates the vast, traumatized America that lives, works and loves outside the castle gates.
In 2005, Lish and his wife spent a year teaching English in China's Hubei Province;[3] a visit to the remote northwest of the country became the inspiration for his Uighur protagonist.
Lish maintains that the two have since reconciled, but that he would "absolutely not" have considered asking his well-respected father for help, either in writing or in marketing his work.
However, after his manuscript was accepted by Tyrant's founder Giancarlo DiTrapano, Gordon Lish helped persuade his own literary agent, Amanda "Binky" Urban, to take his son on as a client.
"[10] Lish spent six years training to become a professional mixed-martial-arts fighter, and continues to practice grappling, including Brazilian jiujitsu, in New York City gyms.