THE GEOGRAPHY OF SAYING GOODBYE

On her deathbed, Paul Canton’s mother declares she’s bound for the Alboran Sea. The nurses dismiss it as nonsense, but the next morning she vanishes, along with her son’s credit card. Paul, who finds leaving his comfort zone “more terrifying than the Third Battle of Nanking,” embarks on a quixotic pursuit of a globe-hopping resurrection, desperate for one last chance to say goodbye. Only the farther he travels, the less he understands the woman who raised him, and the more he realizes how little he’s actually lived.

What begins as a son’s attempt to catch up with a runaway parent becomes something stranger: a detective story without answers, a comedy of errors shot through with longing, and a meditation on what it means to live a life shaped by fear rather than risk. Each stop reveals pieces of his mother’s hidden history and forces Paul to reckon with the choices he has long avoided in his own.

Wry and tender in equal measure, THE GEOGRAPHY OF SAYING GOODBYE blends humor with lyrical observation in a story about family and mortality, yes, but also about learning how to live.