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Coming Up for Air by Sarah Leipciger
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Coming Up for Air

A remarkable true story richly reimagined
Due to publisher restrictions, this audiobook is unavailable for purchase in your selected country.
Length 10 hours 5 minutes
Language English
Narrators Elliot Cowan, Deborah McBride & Claudia Jessie

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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

Born and raised in Canada, Sarah Leipciger lives in London with her three children. She is Associate Lecture in Creative Writing at Birkbeck University and also teaches at City Lit London. Her short fiction has been shortlisted for the Asham Award, the Fish Prize and the Bridport Prize. She is the author of the critically acclaimed THE MOUNTAIN CAN WAIT (2015) and COMING UP FOR AIR (2020). MOON ROAD is her third novel.

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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 Expand reviews
Celebrate indie bookstores with our limited-time sale! Shop the sale