Make A Fist: Life of Starting Over

In 1981, I woke from a coma, looked at my right hand, and was given one simple instruction: make a fist. I've been making one ever since. Mark Lilly's life has been a series of starting-overs most people wouldn't survive once: a catastrophic accident at the edge of adulthood, businesses built and lost, a marriage, a bankruptcy, and - at an age when most careers wind down - a one-way flight to China with two duffel bags and no plan B. What followed was sixteen years across eight international schools in China and Vietnam: canal towns and megacities, classrooms full of students who changed him as much as he changed them, a pandemic that stranded him on the wrong side of the Pacific, and a love story that refused to follow the itinerary. It ends where every honest story ends - mid-reach, with the next chapter unwritten. Told with a mathematician's eye for the facts and a survivor's refusal to flinch, Make a Fist is for anyone who has ever had to begin again: after the injury, after the loss, after fifty. It isn't a book about landing on your feet. It's a book about getting up. Four decades. Two continents. One instruction worth keeping: make a fist, and reach.