Every Country But One: A Novel of Distance, Diagnosis, and Coming Home

Idris Hale has spent thirteen years doing everything right. The scholarship. The analyst programme. The corner office at one of London's top investment banks. He's always told himself the life he actually wants - the one his mother could never afford to have - is waiting for him. Later. Once he's made enough. Then a diagnosis changes the maths. At thirty-two, faced with a body that no longer promises him unlimited "later," Idris walks away from the trading floor to chase the one dream he's kept folded in a shoebox since he was eleven years old: every country in the world, in his mother's memory. What follows isn't a postcard-perfect escape. It's Lisbon and heartbreak. Cuba and a body that won't always cooperate. A devastating relapse in the Peruvian mountains that nearly costs him everything he's built. And a country he never once planned to fall in love with at all. Every Country But One is a novel about the difference between the life we're saving up for and the one we're actually living - funny, unflinching, and finally, hard-won, hopeful. ----- "The bravest version of a decision isn't always the most irreversible one. Sometimes it's the one you can actually sustain."