Breathing Lessons

pT NE TO 77777 'À very good novel from a brilliant writer.… Anne Tyler’s compelling domestic landscape is littered with the defritus of squabbles and selfishness, sacrifice and misunderstanding, yet it never quite loses an optimism under the surface and never fails in its humour’ EVENING STANDARD tn | Even the funeral of her oldest friend's husband cannot threaten the eternal optimism of Maggie Moran. Now nearing fifty, the time of the thickening waist and the diet forever ignored, her inexhaustible passion tor sorting out other people's lives remains. For tra, Maggie s own husband of 28 years, the arrangements are less _ than perfect. To arrive on time they will have to start at eight, and for ‚ this reason alone he is grumpy. He is not an early morning kind - of man. So it is that one hot summer's day they travel to the funeral in Deer Lick. And in the course of that journey an extraordinary account of two very different people unfolds. With this absorbing and superbly narrated novel, Anne Tyler shows us all there is to know about a marriage. The hopes, the -___disappointments, the storms — and how a wife and husband can fall ‘in love all over again… ‘Breathing Lessons is a work of art… all her hundred novelist’s feet are firmly on the ground and she's distinctly going places THE GUARDIAN ‘Anne Tyler has a real gift for generating tender and amazing moments’ THE INDEPENDENT lj Three previous novels by Anne Tyler, EARTHLY POSSESSIONS, SEARCHING FOR CALEB and CELESTIAL NAVIGATION are also available in Pan Books.