After Suleika Jaouad graduated from college, she moved to Paris, found a tiny apartment with a giant pink bathtub, and set out to become a foreign correspondent. But then she got a diagnosis that changed everything. Leukemia. Instead of covering conflicts overseas, she started writing a New York Times column from her hospital bed. Four years later, after leaving the cancer ward for the last time, she set out on a 15,000-mile road trip across the United States, meeting with strangers who’d been touched by her column. She shares their stories and her own in “Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of a Life Interrupted,” which was a New York Times Notable Book of 2021 and is #16 in our countdown.

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