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Breathing Lessons

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Breathing Lessons

By: Anne Tyler
Narrated by: Suzanne Toren
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About this listen

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.

 Contemporary Contemporary Romance Fiction Romance Women's Fiction Marriage

Critic Reviews

A work of art
Her finest novel
A novel by Anne Tyler is a subject for rejoicing...Breathing Lessons is a pleasure
Anne Tyler has a real gift for generating tender and amazing moments
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
A major achievement
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)
A novel by Anne Tyler is a subject for rejoicing...Breathing Lessons is a pleasure to read
Breathing Lessons is a work of art
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)
All stars
Most relevant
It struggled to get started and when it did it left me so frustrated with all the characters. They all made such stupid mistakes and left all the communication to a sad lady who tried so hard to make things work but was so I'll equipt. It made me deflated at the end. I finished it because I wanted some happiness for her but the sweet moment at the end wasn't enough for me.

Disappointing

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I didn't warm to this story - I found the characters very irritating, particularly Maggie who was just an interfering woman, and old for her 48 years. Her husband Ira, also seemed to me to be a man in his 70's.

Annoying characters

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