About the Book

Elliott is forty-two. He has a wife, two children, a steady career in London finance, and a life he's spent mostly on autopilot. Then a routine appointment gives him thirty days to live — the same cancer that killed his father.

What follows is a novel told in two parallel narratives. In London, Elliott tries to do what he never managed in fifteen years of marriage: be present. Really present. For his wife Julia, for twelve-year-old Emma, for four-year-old Liam. For the friends and family he kept at arm's length. The body fails. The conversations happen anyway.

In Oaxaca, Mexico, something else unfolds — a journey through colour, memory, and the place where the living and the dead sit at the same table. The prose shifts. The rules change. Time moves differently.

The novel never tells you which version is real.

Thirty Days is literary fiction for readers of Ann Patchett's Tom Lake and Matt Haig's The Midnight Library — 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 touch of magical realism rooted in Mexican tradition.