While living as an expatriate in England, Emily Waples received an unlikely diagnosis of breast cancer at the age of twenty-four. Interweaving personal narrative, literary analysis, and historical research, this literary medical memoir-in-essays charts Waples's efforts to reconsider her education in literature through the lens of medicine. Framed around a series of literary pilgrimages-to Oxford, the Lake District, the Ridgeway, St. Ives, and the Yorkshire Moors-Unlikely investigates the literal and literary landscapes of illness, examining what it means to live in a precarious body toward an uncertain future. Both fiercely intimate and deeply researched, Unlikely reimagines the illness memoir, offering illuminating, lyrical meditations on gender, illness, medicine, temporality, and mortality.