"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 does not know what a finance director is. He just knows Daddy is tired. He 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 something else is happening too, something he cannot explain and does not question. Another version of these thirty days is unfolding, in the mountains and markets of Oaxaca, Mexico, a place he visited once as a boy with his father, who died of the same illness seven years ago.

Two versions of the same month. Two lives that cannot both be real. Both feel true.

Thirty Days is a debut novel about the distance between being in the room and being present, and whether thirty days is enough."