A Test of Fortitude

Some duties cannot be delegated. Some words cannot be taken back.

Wang Xiu has built a precise London life: a career in numbers, a partner of twenty years who understands her without being asked-and a promise still unkept. Two years after her mother's death, the ashes wait on a shelf in Beijing, for Xiu to come and lay her to rest.

Then a catastrophic haemorrhage deep in Xiu's brainstem threatens to take everything: her movement, her independence, her chance to see her mother right.

From a hospital bed, Xiu fights to reclaim her body one finger, one step at a time. James holds their life together with lists, spreadsheets, and a love that has never needed a certificate. And in Beijing her estranged father, Gang-Wei-proud, exacting, certain of everything except how to reach his daughter across five thousand miles and one unforgivable afternoon-quietly begins to move, with a plan he tells no one.

In group chats and hospital corridors, in everything said and everything carefully not said, a fractured family discovers what it owes its dead-and what it owes its living.

Drawn from real experience of life-and-death neurosurgery, A Test of Fortitude is a novel of filial duty and chosen love, of the ancestors we carry whether we believe in them or not, and of the quiet, unglamorous courage it takes to cross a hospital room-or the world.

Book One of The Fortitude Chronicles.