✨When Breath Becomes Air

NEW YORK TIMES NO.1 bestseller • PULITZER WINNER FINAL FINALS LIST • This inspiring, exquisitely observed memoir finds hope and beauty in the face of insurmountable difficulties when An idealistic young neurosurgeon tries to answer the question What makes a life worth living?

BEEN ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New York Times Book Review • People • NPR • The Washington Post • Slate • Harper's Bazaar • Time Out New York • Publishers Weekly • BookPage

Finalist for the PEN Center of America Literary Award in the Creative Non-Fiction category and the Book Award for a Better Life in Inspirational Memoirs

At the age of 36, about to complete decades of training to become a neurosurgeon, Paul Kalanithi was diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer. One day he was a doctor treating the dying, and the next day he was a patient struggling to live. And just like that, the future he and his wife imagined went up in smoke. When Breath Becomes Air chronicles Kalanithi's transformation from an innocent medical student "obsessed," as he writes, "by the question of what, provided that all living things die, creating an ethical and meaningful life” into a neurosurgeon working in the brain at Stanford, where human identity is most important, and eventually becoming a patient and father just facing his own death.

What makes life worth living in the face of death? What will you do when the future, no longer a ladder toward your goals in life, becomes an eternal present? What does it mean to have a child, to nurture a new life when another is dying? These are some of the questions Kalanithi grapples with in this subtly observed and deeply moving memoir.

Paul Kalanithi died in March 2015 while writing this book, yet his words live on as a guide and a gift to all of us. “I began to realize that facing my own death, in a sense, changed nothing and everything,” he wrote. “Seven words from Samuel Beckett started repeating over and over in my head: 'I can't go on. I'll keep going.'” When Breath Becomes Air is an unforgettable, life-affirming reflection on the challenge of facing death and on the doctor-patient relationship, going from a brilliant writer turned into a brilliant writer. both.