Breathe

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

'America's preeminent fiction writer' New Yorker

“Breathe is a fever dream of a novel, and it’s as an allegory of grief that it most sparkles. . . . Breathe is also a moving meditation on grief time, where there is no beginning, no end, and ‘each hour, each day, passes with excruciating slowness yet it is all happening very quickly.’. . . Oates lands the book’s wonderful ending. . . . Surprising and inevitable.”  — New York Times Book Review
"Breathe is the highly affecting story of a woman facing the unimaginable loss of her spouse. . . . It’s hard to know what is real and what is imagined as the novel rushes toward its shocking and ambiguous ending." — Associated Press
"Effective and harrowing." — Santa Fe New Mexican
“Powerful. . . . Fecund with fear and anguish, and driven by raw, breathless narration, this hallucinatory tale will not disappoint. Oates is on a roll.”
— Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Gut-wrenching and devoid of sentimentality. . . . Recommended." — Library Journal