Between Two Kingdoms

Suleika Jaouad was 22, newly graduated, and planning a life in Paris when a diagnosis of acute myeloid leukemia rerouted everything. Between Two Kingdoms moves through the nearly four years of treatment that followed, the bone-marrow transplant, the relationship that strained under the weight of it, and the strange limbo of being too sick to live and too young to accept dying. The second half follows the 15,000-mile road trip Jaouad took after recovery, visiting the strangers who had written to her during her illness in search of a way to rejoin the world of the living. The book braids the medical years with the long road trip that gave her life a new shape.