The Book of Two Ways blends ancient Egyptian cosmology with modern quantum thinking to ask what makes a life well lived. Through a split narrative born of a near-death experience, the novel tracks the pull of alternate futures alongside the gravity of memory, love, and loss. Its thematic landscape centers on choice and consequence while tracing how the past, regret, and mortality shape who we become.
Major Themes
Choices and Alternate Paths
At the novel’s core is the haunting “what if” that branches a single life into two: “Land/Egypt” and “Water/Boston.” After a plane crash, the question “Where do you need to go?” cleaves Dawn’s story into parallel outcomes—one that returns her to Egypt and Wyatt Armstrong, another that carries her back to Boston and her husband, Brian Edelstein. The ancient Book of Two Ways—a map of two routes to the same end—mirrors Brian’s multiverse framework, suggesting that different choices may coexist and that the meaning lies not only in the destination but in the act of traveling both routes. This engine drives and refracts Regret and Unfinished Business and The Past’s Influence on the Present.
Death, Dying, and the Afterlife
Mortality is both subject and structure: Dawn’s vocation as a death doula positions her at the threshold where practical ritual meets existential mystery, while Egyptology supplies cultural blueprints for a “good death.” The plane crash forces Dawn to inventory what matters, just as funerary texts and tombs testify to humanity’s long preparation for passage. The novel treats death not as an endpoint but as a lens clarifying the value of choice, love, and reconciliation.
The Past’s Influence on the Present
The present is perpetually haunted by what came before. At the brink of death, Dawn’s mind reaches not for Boston but for a fifteen-year-old image of Wyatt, revealing how dormant histories govern current desire and decision. Archaeology becomes metaphor: to live forward, Dawn must excavate who she was and the life she left, unearthing how memory, inheritance, and old commitments press on the now.
Regret and Unfinished Business
Regret powers the novel’s motion. Dawn’s professional question—“What’s left unfinished?”—turns inward as she confronts an abandoned dissertation, a severed love, and the unresolved grief of her mother’s illness and death. Closure here is labor: a reckoning with omissions, a naming of losses, and the courage to either return and repair or accept what cannot be mended.
Supporting Themes
Love, Marriage, and Infidelity — Love, Marriage, and Infidelity
The book juxtaposes the blaze of Dawn’s past romance with the steadier hearth of her marriage, asking whether fidelity is defined by action or intention. Brian’s near-affair with a colleague throws desire, honesty, and commitment into relief, testing whether a partnership can hold multiple forms of love and whether “home” is a choice renewed or a feeling recovered. This theme threads through choices about which path to follow and which past to honor.
Motherhood and Family Dynamics — Motherhood and Family Dynamics
Dawn’s bond with her daughter, Meret Edelstein, anchors the Boston timeline, as teenage vulnerability and parental anxiety intersect with marital strain. Dawn’s earlier caregiving for her mother and brother shapes her identity, showing how family roles—chosen and inherited—fix our trajectories. These dynamics intensify the stakes of choice, deepen regret, and complicate the longing to return to a previous self.
Theme Interactions
- Choices and Alternate Paths ↔ Regret and Unfinished Business: What could be is animated by what should have been. Dawn’s unresolved past with Wyatt catalyzes her decision to fly to Egypt; regret becomes the fuel for alternate futures.
- The Past’s Influence on the Present ↔ Death, Dying, and the Afterlife: Mortality clarifies which memories command us. Near-death distills Dawn’s past into a compass, directing present action toward what demands closure before the final passage.
- Love, Marriage, and Infidelity ↔ Choices and Alternate Paths: Competing loves map onto competing lives. Choosing a partner becomes choosing an ontology—risk and passion versus steadiness and care—while the novel asks whether both paths, in some sense, can be lived.
- Motherhood and Family Dynamics ↔ All Major Themes: Family obligations tighten the web of consequences. Maternal love refracts regret (what didn’t you give?), choice (what will you prioritize?), and mortality (what legacy do you leave?).
Together, these themes form a circuit: Regret → Choice → Consequence → Memory → Renewal (or further regret), with death ever present as the horizon that concentrates meaning.
Thematic Development
- Crisis as Catalyst: The prologue’s near-death moment surfaces the path not taken, revealing how alternate lives live inside us long before we act on them.
- Bifurcation as Inquiry: The split timelines literalize possibility, testing how different choices recalibrate love, vocation, and identity without declaring one “more real” than the other.
- Synthesis Beyond Either/Or: The “After” section collapses the binary, suggesting that the act of contemplating and, in some sense, experiencing both paths is itself transformative. The lesson shifts from “Which life is right?” to “What have these lives taught me about who I am and what matters?”
Universal Messages
- The Inevitability of What If: Wondering about unlived lives is a human constant; alternate selves are part of our psychological architecture.
- Peace Requires Reckoning: The present steadies only when the past is faced—named losses, addressed omissions, and accepted limits.
- Love Contains Multitudes: Passion, commitment, memory, duty—love’s forms can coexist, and a good life may weave several kinds of love without simple hierarchy.
- A Good Death Mirrors a Good Life: Preparation, connection, and closure—tending to unfinished business and to loved ones—shape both how we die and how we live.
Character Embodiment
- Dawn Edelstein — Dawn Edelstein: She is the crossroads of the novel: a death doula trained by the dead, an Egyptologist shaped by the past, a woman split by regret and choice. Her two narratives externalize her interior conflict, turning existential questions into lived routes.
- Brian Edelstein: As a quantum physicist, he supplies the intellectual scaffold for multiplicity while representing the steadiness of a shared present—marriage, parenting, home. His brush with infidelity tests the ethics of thought versus deed and the elasticity of commitment.
- Wyatt Armstrong: He embodies the magnetic past and the lure of an uncompleted life. With archaeology as vocation and metaphor, Wyatt draws Dawn back to what was buried—love, work, and a self she once inhabited.
- Meret Edelstein: Meret concentrates the costs and stakes of choice. Her struggles with identity and security echo Dawn’s thematic arc, reminding us that alternate paths ripple across generations.
- Dawn’s Mother (and Kieran): Their history with illness and caregiving seeds Dawn’s vocation and her sense of duty, entwining family dynamics with mortality and the imperative to finish what matters.