Life Lasts a Month

People are born, reach adulthood within an hour, and die about a month later. The world has always been this way.

Sarah Whitmore is nearing the end of her life when Numa, the sixty-three-year-old dog who has lived at Hawthorn Lane far longer than any human resident, leads her to a hidden metal box.

Inside are photographs, recordings, and messages left by women who died decades before Sarah was born. Their names and faces are different, but fragments of their memories repeat. So do certain gestures, places, objects—and the animals who seem to recognize them.

Sarah begins to suspect that Numa has spent generations finding the same human continuity again and again in different bodies.

But survival may be more complicated than reincarnation. Memories can return without personalities. Love can outlive one identity and become an obligation to another. A person may carry pieces of the dead without knowing where one life ends and the next begins.

As new names, bodies, relationships, and losses accumulate, one question becomes increasingly difficult to escape: if something survives death, how much of the new life should belong to what came before?

Life Lasts a Month is a literary speculative novel about mortality, memory, identity, love, and the strange forms of continuity that may remain when a human lifetime is measured in weeks.