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

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