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Breathing Lessons

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What to expect

Breathing Lessons covers the events of a day in the life of Maggie Moran, nearing fifty, married to Ira and with two children. Her eternal optimism and her inexhaustible passion for sorting out other people's lives and willing them to fall in love is severely tested one hot summer day.

Maggie and Ira drive from Baltimore to Deer Lick to attend the funeral of the husband of Serena, Maggie's childhood friend. During the course of the journey, with its several unexpected detours - into the lives of old friends and grown children - Anne Tyler shows us all there is to know about a marriage: the expectations; the disappointments; the way children can create storms in a family; the way that wife and husband can fall in love all over again; the way that everything - and nothing - changes.

A classic novel from one of America's greatest living novelists, now available as an audiobook.

Critics Review

A work of art
Guardian
Her finest novel
Irish Times
A novel by Anne Tyler is a subject for rejoicing...Breathing Lessons is a pleasure
The Times
Anne Tyler has a real gift for generating tender and amazing moments
Independent
Displays her extraordinary gifts in supreme harmony: exquisite narrative clarity, faultless comic timing, and the Tyler trademark of happy-sad characters inspiring a mid-American domestic drama that somehow slips the surly bonds of the quotidian to become timeless and universal
Guardian, Best 100 Novels of all time
A major achievement
Irish Times
Tyler has such warmth of spirit that almost any novel by her is an escapist pleasure. But this is her masterpiece - one day in the life of a fifty something couple as they journey to a funeral and have their lives laid out in front of us. The book won the Pulitzer and is as human and generous as they come
Sunday Times
A novel by Anne Tyler is a subject for rejoicing...Breathing Lessons is a pleasure to read
The Times
Breathing Lessons is a work of art
Guardian
Anne Tyler's characters are simultaneously funny and sad, heroic and pathetic and none more so than Maggie and Ira...you end up thinking you've known this family all your life
John O'Farrell
Author Anne Tyler
Narrator Suzanne Toren
Duration 12 hours and 26 minutes
Release Date
ISBN 9781473513259
Format Audiobook
Publisher Random House
Genre Contemporary lifestyle fiction, Family life fiction, Modern and contemporary fiction, Narrative theme: Death, grief, loss
Availability AU, GB, IE

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