After clawing his way through a brutal divorce, Peter Stephenson 48 has it all: a multimillion-dollar business, a colossal house in suburban Sydney, an attractive young fiancée, and three children who adore him. But when prostate cancer cruelly strikes, Peter is forced to choose between two horrific treatments, both of which threaten debilitating side effects: impotence, and nappies for life.

After he suffers the worst-case scenario short of death itself, his oncologist gives him an chart showing how many weeks he has lived and how many weeks he supposedly has left to live. When the tiny circles representing weeks change overnight, first subtracting years and then adding them after he works out, loses weight, and eats better, he’s convinced that his doctor and his fiancée are manipulating him. Meanwhile, his four-year-old son Dylan communes with an invisible demonic presence in his bedroom by night, and by day he fills sketchbooks with crayon drawings of Peter dead and buried under the ground.

Debilitated by cancer and distracted by his attempted recovery his consulting business—and family’s finances—collapse with savage
speed.

On his chart, new death dates keep appearing alongside rotating quotations from Stoic philosophers like Seneca and Marcus Aurelius, teaching and reminding Peter that everyone dies, that we should all learn to accept and even love our fate, that cowards die a thousand times while the brave only die once, thus wrapping ourselves in a protective bubble to avoid danger and death does not count as living.

With the countdown shrinking hour by hour and the invisible presence in the house ready to collect what Peter owes, he’s convinced there may be one final way to bargain with fate before it comes for him.