Breathing Lessons

This book is not purchasable in your country. Please select another book.

Listen to a sample

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

Subscribe to our newsletter

Sign up to get tailored content recommendations, product updates and info on new releases. Your data is your own: we commit to protect your data and respect your privacy.