NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A deeply moving memoir of illness and recovery that traces one
young woman’s journey from diagnosis to remission to re-entry into “normal” life—from the
founder of The Isolation Journals and a subject of the Netflix documentary American Symphony
ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The New York Times Book Review The Washington Post
Bloomberg The Rumpus She Reads Library Journal Booklist “I was immersed for the whole
ride and would follow Jaouad anywhere. . . . Her writing restores the moon lights the way as
we learn to endure the unknown.”—Chanel Miller The New York Times Book Review “Beautifully
crafted . . . affecting . . . a transformative read . . . Jaouad’s insights about the self
connectedness uncertainty and time speak to all of us.”— The Washington Post In the summer
after graduating from college Suleika Jaouad was preparing as they say in commencement
speeches to enter “the real world.” She had fallen in love and moved to Paris to pursue her
dream of becoming a war correspondent. The real world she found however would take her into a
very different kind of conflict zone. It started with an itch—first on her feet then up her
legs like a thousand invisible mosquito bites. Next came the exhaustion and the six-hour naps
that only deepened her fatigue. Then a trip to the doctor and a few weeks shy of her
twenty-third birthday a diagnosis: leukemia with a 35 percent chance of survival. Just like
that the life she had imagined for herself had gone up in flames. By the time Jaouad flew home
to New York she had lost her job her apartment and her independence. She would spend much of
the next four years in a hospital bed fighting for her life and chronicling the saga in a
column for The New York Times . When Jaouad finally walked out of the cancer ward—after
countless rounds of chemo a clinical trial and a bone marrow transplant—she was according to
the doctors cured. But as she would soon learn a cure is not where the work of healing ends
it’s where it begins. She had spent the past 1 500 days in desperate pursuit of one goal—to
survive. And now that she’d done so she realized that she had no idea how to live. How would
she reenter the world and live again? How could she reclaim what had been lost? Jaouad
embarked—with her new best friend Oscar a scruffy terrier mutt—on a 100-day 15 000-mile road
trip across the country. She set out to meet some of the strangers who had written to her
during her years in the hospital: a teenage girl in Florida also recovering from cancer a
teacher in California grieving the death of her son a death-row inmate in Texas who’d spent
his own years confined to a room. What she learned on this trip is that the divide between sick
and well is porous that the vast majority of us will travel back and forth between these
realms throughout our lives. Between Two Kingdoms is a profound chronicle of survivorship and a
fierce tender and inspiring exploration of what it means to begin again.
