
Between Two Kingdoms
A Memoir of a Life Interrupted
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Narrated by:
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Suleika Jaouad
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By:
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Suleika Jaouad
About this listen
New York Times best seller
A searing, deeply moving memoir of illness and recovery that traces one young woman’s journey from diagnosis to remission to reentry into “normal” life - from the author of the Life, Interrupted column in The New York Times
One of the Best Books of the Year: The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post, Bloomberg, The Rumpus, She Reads, Library Journal, Booklist
“I was immersed for the whole ride and would follow Jaouad anywhere.... Her writing restores the moon, lights the way as we learn to endure the unknown.” (Chanel Miller, The New York Times Book Review)
“Beautifully crafted...affecting...a transformative read.... Jaouad’s insights about the self, connectedness, uncertainty and time speak to all of us.” (The Washington Post)
In the summer after graduating from college, Suleika Jaouad was preparing, as they say in commencement speeches, to enter “the real world”. She had fallen in love and moved to Paris to pursue her dream of becoming a war correspondent. The real world she found, however, would take her into a very different kind of conflict zone.
It started with an itch - first on her feet, then up her legs, like a thousand invisible mosquito bites. Next came the exhaustion, and the six-hour naps that only deepened her fatigue. Then a trip to the doctor and, a few weeks shy of her 23rd birthday, a diagnosis: leukemia, with a 35 percent chance of survival. Just like that, the life she had imagined for herself had gone up in flames. By the time Jaouad flew home to New York, she had lost her job, her apartment, and her independence. She would spend much of the next four years in a hospital bed, fighting for her life and chronicling the saga in a column for The New York Times.
When Jaouad finally walked out of the cancer ward - after countless rounds of chemo, a clinical trial, and a bone marrow transplant - she was, according to the doctors, cured. But as she would soon learn, a cure is not where the work of healing ends; it’s where it begins. She had spent the past 1,500 days in desperate pursuit of one goal - to survive. And now that she’d done so, she realized that she had no idea how to live.
How would she reenter the world and live again? How could she reclaim what had been lost? Jaouad embarked - with her new best friend, Oscar, a scruffy terrier mutt - on a 100-day, 15,000-mile road trip across the country. She set out to meet some of the strangers who had written to her during her years in the hospital: a teenage girl in Florida also recovering from cancer; a teacher in California grieving the death of her son; a death-row inmate in Texas who’d spent his own years confined to a room. What she learned on this trip is that the divide between sick and well is porous, that the vast majority of us will travel back and forth between these realms throughout our lives. Between Two Kingdoms is a profound chronicle of survivorship and a fierce, tender, and inspiring exploration of what it means to begin again.
©2021 Suleika Jaouad (P)2021 Random House AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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Critic reviews
“A beautiful, elegant, and heartbreaking book that provides a glimpse into the kingdom of illness...Suleika Jaouad avoids sentimentality but manages to convey the depth of the emotional turmoil that illness can bring into our lives.” (Siddhartha Mukherjee, author of The Emperor of All Maladies)
"Here is the key to Between Two Kingdoms - Jaouad’s disarming honesty. There is no self-pity in this telling and few of the expected pieties....Jaouad is writing about a process, a back-and-forth. In the tension between health and sickness, past and present, a new balance must be forged.” (Los Angeles Times)
"I want to describe Suleika Jaouad with words like ‘courageous’, ‘resilient’, ‘vulnerable’, and ‘inspiring’ - but I understand that, for cancer survivors, these words can feel like empty clichés. The problem is, these words are true. Suleika Jaouad is courageous, resilient, vulnerable, and inspiring. And her memoir about her cancer journey is a work of breathtaking creativity and heart-stopping humanity. Jaouad’s story goes where you never expect it to go - not only into the depths of her own pain and lost years, but into the spirits of countless strangers (sick and well) she meets along the highway of own her life and illuminates with rare generosity and grace. This is a deeply moving and passionate work of art, quite unlike anything I’ve ever read. I will remember these stories for years to come, because Suleika Jaouad has imprinted them on my heart.” (Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat Pray Love)
“Jaouad’s book stands out not only because she has lived to parse the saga of her medical battle with the benefit of hindsight, but also because it encompasses the less familiar tale of what it’s like to survive and have to figure out how to live again.” (NPR)
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Less than a century ago, the Second World War took the lives of more than fifty million people; more than six million of them were systematically exterminated through crimes of such enormity that a new name to describe the horror was coined: the Holocaust. Yet amid such darkness, there were glimmers of light—courageous individuals who risked everything to save those hunted by the Nazis.
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Must read! Outstanding and compelling! Couldn’t stop until the end.
- By Integrity personified on 03-03-23
By: Richard Hurowitz
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The Book of Alchemy
- A Creative Practice for an Inspired Life
- By: Suleika Jaouad
- Narrated by: Suleika Jaouad, Vidish Athavale, Fabian Cook Jr., and others
- Length: 9 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
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From the time she was young, Suleika Jaouad has kept a journal. She’s used it to mark life's biggest occasions and to weather its most ferocious storms. Journaling has buoyed her through illness, heartbreak, and the deepest uncertainty. And she is not alone: for so many people, keeping a journal is an essential tool for navigating both the personal peaks and valleys and the collective challenges of modern life. More than ever, we need a space for puzzling through.
By: Suleika Jaouad
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The In-Between
- Unforgettable Encounters During Life's Final Moments
- By: Hadley Vlahos R.N.
- Narrated by: Hadley Vlahos R.N.
- Length: 7 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
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Talking about death and dying is considered taboo in polite company, and even in the medical field. Our ideas about dying are confusing at best: Will our memories flash before our eyes? Regrets consume our thoughts? Does a bright light appear at the end of a tunnel? For most people, it will be a slower process, one eased with preparedness, good humor, and a bit of faith. At the forefront of changing attitudes around palliative care is hospice nurse Hadley Vlahos, who shows that end-of-life care can teach us just as much about how to live as it does about how we die.
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Author's Reach is Beyond Her Grasp
- By CW on 07-26-23
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All That She Carried
- The Journey of Ashley's Sack, a Black Family Keepsake
- By: Tiya Miles
- Narrated by: Janina Edwards
- Length: 9 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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In 1850s South Carolina, an enslaved woman named Rose faced a crisis: the imminent sale of her daughter Ashley. Thinking quickly, she packed a cotton bag for her with a few items, and, soon after, the nine-year-old girl was separated from her mother and sold. Decades later, Ashley’s granddaughter Ruth embroidered this family history on the sack in spare, haunting language. Historian Tiya Miles carefully traces these women’s faint presence in archival records, and, where archives fall short, she turns to objects, art, and the environment to write a singular history of slavery.
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An Astonishing Feat of Scholarship, Imagination and Empathy
- By Cin on 06-30-21
By: Tiya Miles
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Five Families
- The Rise, Decline, and Resurgence of America's Most Powerful Mafia Empires
- By: Selwyn Raab
- Narrated by: Paul Costanzo
- Length: 33 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
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Genovese, Gambino, Bonnano, Colombo, and Lucchese. For decades these Five Families ruled New York and built the American Mafia (or Cosa Nostra) into an underworld empire. Today, the Mafia is an endangered species, battered and beleaguered by aggressive investigators, incompetent leadership, betrayals, and generational changes that produced violent, unreliable leaders and recruits.
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7326451
- By Mark on 10-13-16
By: Selwyn Raab
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Chasing Hope
- A Reporter's Life
- By: Nicholas D. Kristof
- Narrated by: Nicholas D. Kristof
- Length: 17 hrs
- Unabridged
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Since 1984, Nicholas Kristof has worked almost continuously for The New York Times as a reporter, foreign correspondent, bureau chief, and now columnist, becoming one of the foremost reporters of his generation. Here, he recounts his event-filled path from a small-town farm in Oregon to every corner of the world. This is a candid memoir of vulnerability and courage, humility and purpose, mistakes and learning—a singular tale of the trials, tribulations, and hope to be found in a life dedicated to the pursuit of truth.
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Ink Runs In My Veins
- By Lori Breit on 04-01-25
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Solito
- A Memoir
- By: Javier Zamora
- Narrated by: Javier Zamora
- Length: 17 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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Javier Zamora’s adventure is a three-thousand-mile journey from his small town in El Salvador, through Guatemala and Mexico, and across the U.S. border. He will leave behind his beloved aunt and grandparents to reunite with a mother who left four years ago and a father he barely remembers. Traveling alone amid a group of strangers and a “coyote” hired to lead them to safety, Javier expects his trip to last two short weeks.
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MASTERPIECE of Poetic Prose, Outstanding Narration
- By Mary Burnight on 01-12-23
By: Javier Zamora
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The Club
- Johnson, Boswell, and the Friends Who Shaped an Age
- By: Leo Damrosch
- Narrated by: Simon Vance
- Length: 15 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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In 1763, the painter Joshua Reynolds proposed to his friend Samuel Johnson that they invite a few friends to join them every Friday at the Turk's Head Tavern in London to dine, drink, and talk until midnight. Eventually, the group came to include among its members Edmund Burke, Adam Smith, Edward Gibbon, and James Boswell. It was known simply as "the Club". In this captivating audiobook, Leo Damrosch brings alive a brilliant, competitive, and eccentric cast of characters.
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Wonderful survey
- By Tad Davis on 05-10-19
By: Leo Damrosch
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Professional Troublemaker
- The Fear-Fighter Manual
- By: Luvvie Ajayi Jones
- Narrated by: Luvvie Ajayi Jones
- Length: 8 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
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Luvvie Ajayi Jones is known for her trademark wit, warmth, and perpetual truth-telling. But even she's been challenged by the enemy of progress known as fear. She was once afraid to call herself a writer, and nearly skipped out on doing a TED talk that changed her life because of imposter syndrome. As she shares in Professional Troublemaker, she's not alone.
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I’m missing something
- By Cheval Violet on 04-22-21
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And There Was Light
- Abraham Lincoln and the American Struggle
- By: Jon Meacham
- Narrated by: Jon Meacham
- Length: 17 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
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Hated and hailed, excoriated and revered, Abraham Lincoln was at the pinnacle of American power when secessionists gave no quarter in a clash of visions bound up with money, race, identity, and faith. In him we can see the possibilities of the presidency as well as its limitations. This book tells the story of Lincoln from his birth on the Kentucky frontier to his leadership during the Civil War to his tragic assassination: his rise, his self-education, his loves, his bouts of depression, his political failures, his deepening faith, and his persistent conviction that slavery must end.
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A Winner
- By Diane Moore on 10-31-22
By: Jon Meacham
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The Last Season
- By: Eric Blehm
- Narrated by: Jonathan Davis
- Length: 12 hrs and 34 mins
- Unabridged
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Destined to become a classic of adventure literature, The Last Season examines the extraordinary life of legendary backcountry ranger Randy Morgenson and his mysterious disappearance in California's unforgiving Sierra Nevada - mountains as perilous as they are beautiful. Eric Blehm's masterful work is a gripping detective story interwoven with the riveting biography of a complicated, original, and wholly fascinating man.
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Well Written Character Study of an NPS Ranger
- By Kathy in CA on 06-23-16
By: Eric Blehm
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Victim F
- From Crime Victims to Suspects to Survivors
- By: Denise Huskins, Aaron Quinn, Nicole Weisensee Egan
- Narrated by: Brittany Pressley, James Fouhey, Samantha Desz
- Length: 14 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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In March 2015, Denise Huskins and her boyfriend Aaron Quinn awoke from a sound sleep into a nightmare. Armed men bound and drugged them, then abducted Denise. Warned not to call the police or Denise would be killed, Aaron agonized about what to do. Finally he put his trust in law enforcement and dialed 911. But instead of searching for Denise, the police accused Aaron of her murder. His story, they told him, was just unbelievable. When Denise was released alive, the police turned their fire on her, dubbing her the “real-life ‘Gone Girl’” who had faked her own kidnapping.
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I am so saddened for you both!!
- By Anonymous. on 06-09-21
By: Denise Huskins, and others
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Unvarnished
- A Gimlet-Eyed Look at Life Behind the Bar
- By: Eric Alperin, Deborah Stoll
- Narrated by: Eric Alperin
- Length: 6 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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When it opened a decade ago, the acclaimed Los Angeles speakeasy The Varnish - owned, designed, and managed by award-winning cocktail aficionado Eric Alperin - quickly became the stylish standard bearer for modern bars. Unvarnished is a candid, voice-driven, no-holds-barred look at the workings of a bar, and the foundation of The Varnish’s success: attention to hospitality and an abiding belief in the nobility of service.
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One of the most accurate accounts of being behind a bar
- By Brian T on 07-14-23
By: Eric Alperin, and others
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I Cried to Dream Again
- Trafficking, Murder, and Deliverance - A Memoir
- By: Sara Kruzan, Cori Thomas
- Narrated by: January LaVoy
- Length: 6 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
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There is perhaps no crime more disturbing than the abuse of a child—and no court cases as upsetting as those in which juveniles who have faced abuse are tried for fighting back. In this gripping memoir Sara Kruzan, a survivor of childhood abuse and sex trafficking, tells the honest, disturbing, and ultimately empowering story of her journey from abuse to incarceration without parole for killing her abuser to finally gaining her liberation.
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A True Warrior
- By Thixso on 02-27-24
By: Sara Kruzan, and others
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This Is Going to Hurt
- Secret Diaries of a Young Doctor
- By: Adam Kay
- Narrated by: Adam Kay
- Length: 5 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
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Welcome to 97-hour weeks. Welcome to life and death decisions. Welcome to a constant tsunami of bodily fluids. Welcome to earning less than the hospital parking meter. Wave goodbye to your friends and relationships. Welcome to the life of a first-year doctor. Scribbled in secret after endless days, sleepless nights, and missed weekends, comedian and former medical resident Adam Kay’s This Is Going to Hurt provides a no-holds-barred account of his time on the front lines of medicine.
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Awesome
- By karen on 06-15-22
By: Adam Kay
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Paula
- A Memoir
- By: Isabel Allende
- Narrated by: Isabel Allende, Cynthia Farrell
- Length: 14 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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When her daughter, Paula, became gravely ill and fell into a coma, Isabel Allende began to write the story of her family for her unconscious child. Bizarre ancestors are introduced; delightful and bitter childhood memories are shared; amazing anecdotes of youthful years are relived, and the most intimate secrets are quietly passed along. Like Allende’s first novel, The House of the Spirits, this powerful memoir is infused with the real, the magical, and the spiritual, creating a haunting, sad, and beautiful tale.
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Words for the soul
- By Grethel Gait��n on 08-13-20
By: Isabel Allende
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The Best Minds
- A Story of Friendship, Madness, and the Tragedy of Good Intentions
- By: Jonathan Rosen
- Narrated by: Jonathan Rosen
- Length: 16 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
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Acclaimed author Jonathan Rosen’s haunting investigation of the forces that led his closest childhood friend, Michael Laudor, from the heights of brilliant promise to the forensic psychiatric hospital where he has lived since killing the woman he loved. A story about friendship, love, and the price of self-delusion, The Best Minds explores the ways in which we understand—and fail to understand—mental illness.
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The Overwhelming Tragedy of Mental Illness
- By Elephants Matter on 12-30-23
By: Jonathan Rosen
What listeners say about Between Two Kingdoms
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Overall
- Purdue Doc
- 12-05-21
Amazing read
The writer's style of writing was as if she were sitting next to me telling her story...captivating, moving. motivating, made me laugh, made me want to cry...she is so insightful and descriptions made me feel like I was in the room watching her story unfold...loved it...
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- T K C
- 08-29-21
A Kingdom Comes
So good and so inspiring. Just when I thought I had it tough, along came Suleika.
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- Mary Casey
- 03-27-21
Absolutely loved this book!!!
As a pedi oncology/BMT nurse for 30 years, this book is very special to me. The author was so truthful with her story and I am extremely grateful she shared her experiences with the world. Thank you!!
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- Carol
- 03-16-21
Inspiring, well written and read by the author! l
I loved hearing Suleika Tell her story of both her journey through cancer treatment and across the country. I will read her next book whatever it's about, because I really enjoy her writing style as well as her storytelling.
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- DMG
- 04-02-21
Worth the read
Honest, well-written, painful and hopeful look at lives not just interrupted but transformed. This is the protagonist's journey, the journeys of those who went with her, voluntarily or not, and how her cancer transformed them all.
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- Danielle Lauber
- 09-02-21
Beautiful and well written
I’d recommend this for anyone seeking a beautiful and well written story that happens to be a memoir. Just press play and you’ll be pulled in.
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- Monica Betancur
- 04-03-21
Kingdoms might not be the same, but we can relate.
I liked everything about the book and I can relate. I'm between 2 kingdoms as well: The kingdom of "the normal, typical" and the kingdom of the mom of a special needs child. I guess being outside the norm bring us to a very close place where we have so much in common and only we can understand each other.
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- Bridget M
- 08-02-21
Everyone can relate to this story in some way!
As a person born with a terminal illness and recently having lost my young brother to cancer at only 22, there are so many lessons I learned in this book. There was recently a miracle medication that has turned the tides on my illness in a positive direction beyond my wildest dreams. I can strong relate to being in between the kingdom of sick and health — there are so many lessons to be learned in the in between. Thank you Suleika for your beautiful words.
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- Chatty Kathy
- 06-24-21
life changing!!
I loved every minute of this book. I I'm feeling so grateful for my health and my life and it's changed the way I feel when I wake up every morning. Thank you for sharing your for sharing your life. I highly recommend this book!!
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- diane
- 06-30-21
What an extraordinarily well written book by someone who knows the true meaning of life!
This was an extremely well written story that everyone, regardless of their life’s experiences, should read!
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