Breathing Lessons
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  • Published: 22 May 2014
  • ISBN: 9781473513259
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: Audio Download
  • Length: 12 hr 26 min
  • Narrator: Suzanne Toren

Breathing Lessons

Formats & editions
Paperback
3 Nov 1992
Audiobook
22 May 2014
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Sometimes it's the most ordinary days that can take us most by surprise.

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.
  • Published: 22 May 2014
  • ISBN: 9781473513259
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: Audio Download
  • Length: 12 hr 26 min
  • Narrator: Suzanne Toren
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About the author

Anne Tyler

Anne Tyler was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in 1941 and grew up in Raleigh, North Carolina. Her bestselling novels include Breathing Lessons, The Accidental Tourist, Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, Ladder of Years, Back When We Were Grownups, A Patchwork Planet, The Amateur Marriage, Digging to America, A Spool of Blue Thread, Vinegar Girl and Clock Dance.

In 1989 she won the Pulitzer Prize for Breathing Lessons; in 1994 she was nominated by Roddy Doyle and Nick Hornby as 'the greatest novelist writing in English'; in 2012 she received the Sunday Times Award for Literary Excellence; and in 2015 A Spool of Blue Thread was a Sunday Times bestseller and was shortlisted for the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction and the Man Booker Prize.

portrait photo of Anne Tyler

Also by Anne Tyler

Clock Dance
French Braid
Ladder of Years
Redhead by the Side of the Road
The Beginner's Goodbye
A Spool of Blue Thread
Vinegar Girl
See all

Praise for Breathing Lessons

A novel by Anne Tyler is a subject for rejoicing...Breathing Lessons is a pleasure

The Times

A major achievement

Irish 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 work of art

Guardian

Her finest novel

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

Stig Abell, Sunday Times

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

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

An arresting slice of Baltimore life

Independent

Her writing style is superb...there is humour...the dialogue both external and internal is fantastic

Savidge Reads