Larry's Kidney: Being the True Story of How I Found Myself in China with My Black Sheep Cousin and His Mail-Order Bride, Skirting the Law to Get Him a Transplant--and Save His Life

“One of the funniest, most touching and bizarre nonfiction books I’ve read.”
—Boston Globe

Larry’s Kidney is Daniel Asa Rose’s wild-and-crazy memoir about his trip to Beijing, China, to help his black-sheep cousin Larry receive an illegal kidney transplant, collect a mail-order bride, and stop a hit-man from killing their uncle. An O. Henry Prize winner,  a two-time recipient of PEN Fiction Awards, and a 2006 National Endowment for the Arts Literary Fellow, Rose has written “a surprisingly fun, and moving, book with resonance” (Chicago Tribune).

Larry Feldman desperately needed a kidney. After two god-awful years on dialysis, watching his life ebb away while waiting on a transplant list behind 74,000 other Americans, the gun-toting couch potato decided to risk everything and travel to China, the controversial kingdom of organ transplants. But Larry urgently needed his cousin Daniel's help...even though they had been on the outs with each other for years.

So begins the quest of two star-crossed cousins to rejuvenate Larry's failing body and ever-romantic heart, while avoiding getting tossed into a Chinese slammer.

“’Larry’s Kidney’ is a quick, funny book crammed with colorful characters and zippy dialogue.” - Richmond Times-Dispatch

“One of the funniest, most touching and bizarre nonfiction books I’ve read.” - Boston Globe

“Daniel Asa Rose’s true and funny story...delivers” - New York Daily News

“Rose is the master of dialogue...Larry’s Kidney is side-splittingly funny. Pun intended.” - Milwaukee Sentinel Journal

“[This] stranger-than-fiction memoir by Daniel Asa Rose, serves as an enjoyable testament to the lengths to which we sometimes go to help family...The ensuing adventure is the stuff of slapstick comedy.” - Washington Post

“Told largely in hilarious dialogue that doesn’t shy away from politically incorrect approximations of Larry’s speech impediment and Chinese attempts at colloquial English, and unafraid of raising troubling issues about organ donation, political repression and espionage in China, this book is hard to categorize but easy to read....Larry’s the kind of relative most of us would avoid at all costs, but by the end of this book we realize that, unlikely as it seems, he had us from ‘Huwwo.’” - Hartford Courant