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Coming Up for Air

A remarkable true story richly reimagined

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Coming Up for Air

By: Sarah Leipciger
Narrated by: Elliot Cowan, Deborah McBride, Claudia Jessie
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Summary

Brought to you by Penguin.

Three extraordinary lives intertwine across oceans and time.

On the banks of the River Seine in 1899, a young woman takes her final breath before plunging into the icy water. Although she does not know it, her decision will set in motion an astonishing chain of events. It will lead to 1950s Norway, where a grieving toy-maker is on the cusp of a transformative invention, all the way to present-day Canada where a journalist, battling a terrible disease, risks everything for one last chance to live.

Taking inspiration from a remarkable true story, Coming Up for Air is a bold, richly imagined novel about the transcendent power of storytelling and the immeasurable impact of every human life.

© Sarah Leipciger 2020 (P) Penguin Audio 2020

 20th Century Fiction Genre Fiction Historical Fiction Literary Fiction Medical Women's Fiction Biography Friendship

Critic Reviews

Coming Up For Air confirms Sarah Leipciger as a major talent. A meditation on mortality and our will to survive and save, it's really bold in its weaving of three ingeniously linked storylines and rich in sensuous detail and vivid characterisation. I can't wait for her next.
A stunning, stirring story told with exceptional skill and rare beauty.

Sarah Leipciger captures the nature of solitude and stillness in a way that no other writer does. THE MOUNTAIN CAN WAIT was a wonder. COMING UP FOR AIR expands her range even further, exploring that eerie shoreline where land and ocean meet, where breathing becomes drowning, and life teeters on the very edge.
An extraordinary, three-century braid of air and water: the way we float, the way we drown, the way we surface again against the odds.
Vivid, evocative, moving. I loved it
Here is a novel that dares to cross the boundaries of time, the elements, life and death, and does so with the twists and hooks and magic of a consummate story teller.
Spellbinding and beautifully written . . . an extraordinary novel. I can’t wait to read what Leipciger writes next.
Exceptional skill... exquisite descriptions... Fact and fiction flow together like two rivers conjoining and making together for the sea... a beautiful novel of compassion...
Dazzling . . . A stunning interwoven story of three threads set in different times and countries . . . I savoured every word of its beautiful prose.
Hauntingly melancholic and richly detailed
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