BETWEEN THIS WORLD AND THE NEXT

Praveen Herat

• Winner of the 2022 Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing

A passionate exploration of power, poverty, and greed, “Between This World and The Next” pushes immigrant writing to another literary stage.

A brainy and headlong international thriller of arms dealing, “Between This World and the Next” opens in Phnom Penh in 1998 and tells the story of Fearless, a burned-out British war photographer, and Song, a Cambodian woman who has been physically and psychologically damaged by the violence in her country.

When Song disappears, leaving only a mysterious videotape behind, Fearless must navigate a dangerous network of shady power brokers, transnational kingpins, sex traffickers, and arms dealers, uncovering a sprawling network of criminality and corruption in a new, post-Soviet world.

Herat challenges our own complicity as passive observers when exposed to a constant stream of media depicting suffering across the planet, and asks what we truly know about anyone, even the people we hold dearest.

With sharp new perspective and immediate sense of place, this propulsive, page-turning thriller counters assumptions of what an immigrant writer is supposed to be. Riven by dark acts, the story is uplifted by love—the love between sisters, the love of the bereaved, and a remarkable platonic love between Fearless and Song.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Praveen Herat is a first-generation immigrant. Born in London to Sri Lankan parents, he holds an M.A. in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia. An itinerant emigrant, he lived for three years in Phnom Penh and currently lives in Paris. He has worked to support victims of domestic abuse, project manage museum events and as an academic coach for young students. This is his first novel.