Between Two Kingdoms

At twenty-two, Suleika Jaouad had just moved to Paris to chase a dream when her body turned against her — a leukemia diagnosis that would consume the next four years of her life in hospitals, treatments, and the grinding uncertainty of survival. Between Two Kingdoms is her account of that period, but it refuses to be a simple illness narrative. What Jaouad captures so precisely is the particular exile of serious illness: the way it severs you from the life you expected, from the person you were becoming, and deposits you in a liminal space where the rules of ordinary living no longer apply.

What distinguishes the book is Jaouad's insistence on complexity — she doesn't let recovery be the neat second act it's supposed to be. Her writing is clear-eyed and unsentimental without ever being cold, and the memoir's structure mirrors its subject: a gradual, nonlinear reorientation toward the world. The post-remission road trip she undertakes to visit strangers who wrote to her during treatment becomes the book's emotional engine, a way of testing whether she can inhabit a life again. Readers who have felt caught between who they were and who they might become will find something true here.