Aidan Perez has spent years not quite arriving. He built a global tech company in the south of France. He navigated the exit he had long been working toward. He moved to Singapore to be near his daughter - who has since moved on. He has built everything he set out to build. He just can't remember what any of it was for.
Then he stumbles on a small, anonymous manuscript at his favourite restaurant. A booklet called Five Steps to Joyful Wisdom, left as if by accident, written as if for him. Obsessed with finding its author, he embarks on a search through Singapore's humid, disorienting streets - through temples, rainforest walks, and an unlikely community of seekers - and deeper into questions about who he has been, and who he is becoming.
What he cannot yet see is that the manuscript has been finding him for longer than he realises. And that the search for its author will lead him somewhere he has been avoiding for years.
This is not a book about grief. It never uses the word. But something in it finds the reader before the reader finds it.
The Eagle That Drank Hummingbird Nectar is a novel about the cost of absence - and the strange, irreversible grace of finally paying attention.