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by: Tim Winton
List Price: $23.00Amazon.com's Price: $15.64 You Save: $7.36 (32%)Prices subject to change.
Binding: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 823.914
EAN: 9780374116347
ISBN: 0374116342
Label: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Manufacturer: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 224
Publication Date: May 27, 2008
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Release Date: May 27, 2008
Sales Rank: 63784
Studio: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
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Editorial Review:
Product Description:
Tim Winton is Australia’s best-loved novelist. His new work,Breath, is an extraordinary evocation of an adolescence spent resisting complacency, testing one’s limits against nature, finding like-minded souls, and discovering just how far one breath will take you. It’s a story of extremes—extreme sports and extreme emotions. On the wild, lonely coast of Western Australia, two thrillseeking and barely adolescent boys fall into the enigmatic thrall of veteran big-wave surfer Sando. Together they form an odd but elite trio. The grown man initiates the boys into a kind of Spartan ethos, a regimen of risk and challenge, where they test themselves in storm swells on remote and shark-infested reefs, pushing each other to the edges of endurance, courage, and sanity. But where is all this heading? Why is their mentor’s past such forbidden territory? And what can explain his American wife’s peculiar behavior? Venturing beyond all limits—in relationships, in physical challenge, and in sexual behavior—there is a point where oblivion is the only outcome. Full of Winton’s lyrical genius for conveying physical sensation, Breath is a rich and atmospheric coming-of-age tale from one of world literature’s finest storytellers.
Customer Reviews
Average Rating: 
Rating:  - Keeps you holding your breath
Breath is a masterfully written tale of what it means to live in extremes; and since most of us, in our own ways, do, it's a tale about what it means to be alive. I'm ashamed to say that I only heard of Tim Winton when a blogger recently wrote that Saltwater Buddha: A Surfer's Quest to Find Zen on the Sea reminded him of Winton's surf literature. I am now very honored to be mentioned in his company.
A novelist with a voice no one could copy, Winton's ability to be colloquial while employing ... Read More
Rating: - Powerful, moving, beautifully written. If not for the central event of the novel, this could have been such a good teen read
Middle-aged paramedic reflects back on experiences as 15-yr-old, when he and a friend are taken under the wing of an aging surfer and taught the skills and passion for extreme surfing. The older surfer's wife is an American ex-skier now felled by injury and her sexual seduction of the 15-yr-old is also part of his memories. The drive to surf for the sheer beauty, challenge, and thrill of it stands in stark contrast to the workaday world of the boy's family. He watches while his friend risks his life on ... Read More
Rating:  - Tim Winton is my new favorite author
BREATH is a mesmerizing reverie about the meaning of courage - and life itself - that sucks the reader in from the first page to the last. This bittersweet coming of age story set on the wild coast of Western Australia follows two boys as they become obsessed with surfing and are both themselves compelled, as well as encouraged by their charismatic mentor, to pit themselves against ever more dangerous waves.
Deft, delicate characterizations set against a big country and its rugged people are ... Read More
Rating: - `I've bored people in bars and lost a marriage to silence.'
The novel opens with the middle-aged Bruce Pike, then a paramedic, attending the scene of a death that everyone else considers (or wants) to be a suicide. Bruce doesn't believe that it is and thus begins the body of the novel where Bruce recalls his youth (during the 1970s) in a conservative logging town near the coast in Western Australia. In less than 220 pages, Tim Winton creates the angst of growing up, of finding your own way when those around you seem to be lost and captures the beauty and cruelty of ... Read More
Rating: - Hauntingly beautiful
Bruce Pike, or Pikelet, now in his fifties looks back over his life and especially the years just prior to and through his early teens. He grew up in the 60s/70s in a small town near the South Australia coast, something of a loner until he meets Looney, a year older and with a lust for danger. They become mates and take to surfing. Sando, in his thirties married to an American woman, a surfer treated with a detached reverence by the other regular surfers takes the two boys under his wing; and Sando's home becomes ... Read More
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