Between This World and the Next

Winner of the 2022 Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing, Praveen Herat’s gripping international thriller is a breathtaking exploration of power, identity, unconditional love, and the question of how far we’ll go to uncover the truth.

British war photographer Joseph Nightingale, known to his colleagues as Fearless, is haunted by a brutal past and a present that has grown unrecognizable. Besieged by grief over the loss of his partner and unborn child, he travels to Cambodia, where a reunion with an old friend leads him to a young woman named Song. Imprisoned by circumstance, she, too, is longing for a past she can’t reconcile and grappling with the disappearance of her twin sister. Soon after their paths cross, Song vanishes, leaving behind only a mysterious videotape, and Fearless finds himself entangled in a web of transnational sex traffickers, corrupt power brokers, and ruthless arms dealers, where nothing and no one are what they seem.

In a place where human life is cheap and violence is just a means to an end, Fearless and Song must go to new lengths to confront their separate demons. Pulse-pounding and poignant, Between this World and the Next balances devastating cruelty with unexpected redemption. In this arresting page-turner, Praveen Herat blurs the boundaries between good and evil, asking us to reexamine complicity and the consequences of looking the other way.