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Praise for David Lida’s One Life

“David Lida’s One Life is full of suspense and beautifully described moments that often conjure Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Paramo. Like his courageous protagonist Richard, who often journeys to the most dismal and violent places in rural Mexico in search of an elusive history, Lida fearlessly explores the stark places that often shape the human spirit.”

— Maria Venegas, author of Bulletproof Vest: the Ballad of an Outlaw and his Daughter

“Lida, himself a mitigation specialist and writer with deep ties to Mexico (where he lives), pours personal emotion into his story. In the process, he brings an elusive sense of dignity to a world where it is seemingly lost.”

— Kirkus Reviews

“David Lida’s daring novel One Life will take you on a journey to darkest Mexico, where daily life is rich with irony and pathos, violence and humor, destitution and the homeliest of comforts. Richard, your travel guide, is on a mythic quest; he must descend to the underworld and come out with a story that will move the stone hearts of a Louisiana jury to mercy. His goal is to save the life of a condemned woman whose name, Esperanza, means hope. One life, his for hers. Gripping, suspenseful, worldly, and wise, this thought-provoking novel never lets up and the serious moral questions it raises resound long after the final page is turned.”

— Valerie Martin, author of The Ghost of the Mary Celeste

“As I followed Richard, the unraveling narrator of David Lida’s One Life, I kept seeing, peeking around the corner, the whiskey priest from Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory. They both minister to a population so forsaken it has lost faith in mercy. For the Mexicans of Lida’s novel, there are only labor and fate, the former measured by dollars, the latter doled out by the country that issues them. Which only makes Lida’s achievement more remarkable: To follow Richard is to relinquish Anglo time, Anglo logic, Anglo law — to say nothing about the assumptions that obtain about here and ‘down there.’”

— Boris Fishman, author of A Replacement Life