About the Book

Living let him perform. Dying gave him meaning.

Elliott is forty-two, a finance director in the City of London, a loving husband of fifteen years, a proud father of two. His daughter has stopped asking him to stay and started asking him to look up. His four-year-old son doesn't know what a finance director is. He just knows Daddy is tired. Elliott has been in the room for all of it. He has been present for almost none of it.

Then a terminal diagnosis gives him thirty days.

Not thirty days to fix everything. Not thirty days to tick off a list. Thirty days to do something he has never managed in forty-two years of living: to stop performing the role of husband, father, son, and brother—and to actually be one.

He tries. In London, surrounded by the people he loves, he tries. But dying has a way of unsettling what you thought you knew—about your family, your father, and the life you were so busy living that you forgot to notice it.

Thirty Days is a debut novel about the distance between being in the room and being present—and whether thirty days is enough. Literary fiction for readers of Fredrik Backman's A Man Called Ove, Paul Kalanithi's When Breath Becomes Air, and Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go—a story about what it means to truly live when you're running out of time, told with dark British humour, psychological precision, and a final act that quietly bends reality.