Breathe
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- £4.99
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- £4.99
Publisher Description
‘America’s preeminent fiction writer’ New Yorker
‘A raw, propulsive tale of love and grief’ Mail on Sunday
A novel of love and loss from the bestselling and prizewinning author of Blonde.
Michaela and her husband have moved to the starkly beautiful but uncanny landscape of New Mexico, to take up an academic residency. But when Gerard is struck by a fatal illness, their life begins to resemble a nightmare. At thirty-seven, Michaela must first face the terrifying prospect of widowhood, then the chaos of the days when Gerard is gone.
Haunting and utterly heart-wrenching, Breathe explores the intense madness of grief and what happens when a love cannot be surrendered.
‘A fever dream of a novel’ New York Times
‘Simply the most consistently inventive, brilliant, curious and creative writer going, as far as I’m concerned’ Gillian Flynn, author of Gone Girl
Reviews
Praise for Breathe:
‘The dizzyingly prolific Oates returns with a raw, propulsive tale of love and grief. It unfolds against the stark landscape of New Mexico, where 37-year-old Michaela’s older husband, a Harvard professor, has taken up an academic residency, only to be stricken with a fatal illness. In the nightmarish moths that follow, Michaela cares for him with desperate devotion; in the aftermath, her struggle to accept his loss sends her hurtling towards a hallucinatory denouement’ Hephzibah Anderson, New York Times
‘The myth of Orpheus and Eurydice and the demon-gods of the Native American Pueblo people combine to nightmarish effect in Joyce’s unrelenting latest, which is set against the uncanny landscape of New Mexico … nothing in her hallucinatory horror equals the simple, devastating awfulness of the moment when Michaela discovers her dying partner, his brilliant mind now addled with opioids, trying to read his paper upside down’ Stephanie Cross, Daily Mail
‘Breathe is a fever dream of a novel, and it’s as an allegory of grief that it most sparkles. What appears to be hallucination is actually more emotionally complicated’ Joshua Henkin, New York Times
‘The dizzyingly prolific Oates returns with a raw, propulsive tale of love and grief ’ Mail on Sunday
‘Breathe is a fever dream of a novel, and it’s as an allegory of grief that it most sparkles. What appears to be hallucination is actually more emotionally complicated’ New York Times
About the author
Joyce Carol Oates is a recipient of the National Book Critics Circle Lifetime Achievement Award, the National Book Award, the PEN/Malamud Award, the LA Times Book Award (2018) and the Jerusalem Prize (2019). Her books include We Were the Mulvaneys, Blonde, Carthage, A Book of American Martyrs, Hazards of Time Travel, My Life as a Rat and Night. Sleep. Death. The Stars. She is Professor of Humanities at Princeton University
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Shards of nightmarish grief coalesce in Oates's powerful latest (after The (Other) You), a fever dream unleashed when a woman fails to come to terms with the death of her husband. As the story opens, memoir writer Michaela wills her older, very ill husband, Gerard McManus, a distinguished historian of science, to breathe. Midway through the book, he succumbs to his multiple maladies: pneumonia, lung cancer, and a urethral tumor. Michaela then finds his death impossible to believe, or to accept. Overwhelmed, she drifts and is jerked in and out of reality. Sometimes she is unsure if Gerard is really dead; she sees him in other men, and believes Gerard is compelling her to follow each one. She is terrified by statues of Pueblo gods that decorate the house they'd rented together, yet cannot bear to leave. These gods—and other myths, that of Eurydice and Orpheus for one—inhabit her dreams and obsess Michaela as she spirals into a surreal and open-ended denouement that will be hotly debated by readers. Fecund with fear and anguish, and driven by raw, breathless narration, this hallucinatory tale will not disappoint. Oates is on a roll.