"The Book of Two Ways" by Jodi Picoult

An audio book.

• The narrator, Dawn (nearly 40), once survived a plane crash. Her job is a therapist for dying people - a death mid-wife.
• Then there's an info-dump history lesson about old Egypt.
• Then she returns after there 15 years to a remote site in middle Egypt.
• Then she's starting as a young graduate Egyptology student at Yale and meets Wyatt.
• When she returns to the Egypt site, Wyatt (now a marquess) is still there. He'd used some of her ideas in his publications. She wants a job.
• Then she's back with husband Brian and 14 y.o. daughter Merrit. She wonders whether her love for Brian is an example of Stockholm syndrome. How long has passed since she left? We don't know. She'd walked out after he'd returned innocently from a seductive female graduate's room, forgetting it was Merrit's birthday. Merrit's already a scientist. She has body-image issues.
• We learn that Dawn's father had died early. Her mother (Irish, superstitious) had been suddenly hospiced, disrupting her PhD. She'd met physicist Brian in the hospice waiting room and got pregnant after a consoling one-night-stand. On that first night together "Brian traced my body, mapping me as if I were a new constellation and his destination depended on navigating by it". He told her about the double slit experiment and multiverses, which is used as an analogy for might-have-beens, etc. Aaargh. She has a younger brother, Kieran, so she can't continue her research.

Then the switching of time-lines settles down. She finds a new client, Win - an artist. She tries to find the father of Win's dead son online. Win dictates a letter that she wants Dawn to give to him. Dawn tries to make it up with Brian, realising that the way see touched her mother before she died is the way she's touching Brian now.

We learn about the field trips when Dawn was a student. In the 3rd year she slept with sometime rival Wyatt ("Indiana Jones"). The novel jumps between the 2 phases of her time in Egypt. Soon after her later visit she sleeps with Wyatt again. He has "The bright blue eyes that would have been the pilot light inside me". Then the dig benefactor turns up. Onya is pretty, rich and Wyatt's fiance.

We're nearly half way through before we learn that her brother's a gay doctor. I expect to hear about how he coped with a dying mother. But no.

Dawn has to deliver Win's letter by hand to her ex-lover who lives in London. Merrit has a DNA-testing present which reveals that Brian's not her father (a surprise to all), triggering a chain of events that recapitulates earlier chapters. Dawn still goes to London. At the last moment (not wanting to wreck an apparently happy family by giving news) she doesn't deliver the letter. At the very last moment she doesn't return to Boston but goes to Cairo, the Cairo airport scene repeating almost word for word an earlier section. When she tells Wyatt about the DNA test he flies back with her. The plane (in a section which repeats almost word for word an earlier section) crashes. Dawn and Wyatt survive. Brian meets Wyatt.

Dawn and Wyatt decide they've loved each other for 15 years. Brian accuses her of being selfish. She lists those who she's sacrificed herself for - just about everyone. She attends Win's death. She returns to her house to find Brian, Wyatt and Merrit around the kitchen table eating pizza.

There's a non-binary theme - not just regarding life/death, but also how one act of infidelity needn't destroy a marriage, how decisions needn't be final.

There are long meditations on dying and different coping strategies.

There's too much about Egyptology. When a new subject (marriage, etc) comes up, we hear the old Egypt take on it. This could be a way of showing how obsessed she is with Wyatt. The comparison of new/old attitudes to death is interesting though, and some aspects of hieroglyph interpretation are interesting in themselves. There are some bad sex/love scenes - science imagery when with a scientist, Egypt imagery when with an Egyptologist, etc - "When he swells inside me, when neither of us blinks, I wonder if this is what it's like for the moon when she pulls the tide and changes the shape of the world". I like "We hide in our own pleasure". I'm unsure about "truth vibrates when it's drawn across the bow of pain"

Other reviews

• Goodreads
• Kirkus reviews (The characters’ professions are far better defined than their motivations. A midlife crisis story stifled by enough material for several TED talks.)