Book excerpt: Some time around his fiftieth birthday, Ambrose Zephyr fails his annual medical check-up. An illness of inexplicable origin with no known or foreseeable cure is diagnosed and it will kill him within a month. Give or take a day. In the time that remains, he decides to travel to all the places he has most loved or ever wanted to visit, in strict alphabetical order. And so Ambrose and his wife Zipper embark on a strange adventure that takes them further and further away from home and doesn't quite turn out as either of them had expected.