Holding Her Breath


Book Description

SHORTLISTED FOR THE IRISH BOOK AWARDS 2021 SHORTLISTED FOR THE KATE O'BRIEN AWARD 2022 'A stunning debut from this new Irish talent' STELLAR _____________ A young woman comes of age in the shadow of her family's tragic past When Beth Crowe starts university, she is shadowed by the ghost of her potential as a competitive swimmer. Free to create a fresh identity for herself, she finds herself among people who adore the poetry of her grandfather, Benjamin Crowe, who died tragically before she was born. She embarks on a secret relationship - and on a quest to discover the truth about Benjamin and his widow, her beloved grandmother Lydia. The quest brings her into an archive that no scholar has ever seen, and to a person who knows things about her family that nobody else knows. Holding Her Breath is a razor-sharp, moving and seriously entertaining novel about complicated love stories, ambition and grief - and a young woman coming fully into her powers. __________ 'A beautiful coming-of-age story told with impressive skill and lightness of touch . . . I absolutely loved it' LOUISE O'NEILL 'Whip smart observations and addictive prose' SUNDAY TELEGRAPH 'Precise, sure, engaging, and a joy to read' RODDY DOYLE 'Effortlessly weaving together a gripping, multi-layered plot, while maintaining a profoundly tender touch, Ryan has marked herself as a captivatingly original voice in Irish literature' HOT PRESS 'A moving debut with a satisfying conclusion' IRISH INDEPENDENT 'Brilliant, vivid - I enjoyed this book ENORMOUSLY' MARIAN KEYES 'Enthralling' IMAGE 'A nimble account of student life with a darkly enjoyable undercurrent of secrecy and emotional turmoil' SARA BAUME 'A truly compelling read, and one I wholeheartedly recommend' BUZZ 'Through the dark sky of our times, Eimear Ryan arrives like a comet, a bright talent scorching through every page' DOIREANN NÍ GHRÍOFA, author of A Ghost in the Throat 'Brilliantly realised, gripping, and moving . . . This is absolutely the real thing' KEVIN POWER 'Written with a wonderful clarity and insight, Holding Her Breath lingers in the imagination. Beth's unravelling and re-ravelling is drawn with great skill and empathy. A brilliant debut' DONAL RYAN




Holding My Breath


Book Description

This poignant coming-of-age tale is told from the point of view of the precocious Beth Levy, the youngest in a household of two generations of strong Jewish women in post-World War II Winnipeg.




Breath


Book Description

After contracting polio as a young girl Martha Mason of tiny Lattimore, North Carolina, lived a record sixty-one of her seventy-one years in an iron lung until her death in 2009, but she never let the 800-pound cylinder define her. The subject of a documentary film, an NPR feature, an ABC News piece, and a widely syndicated New York Times obituary, Martha enjoyed life, and people. From within her iron lung, she graduated first in her class in high school and at Wake Forest University, and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. She was determined to be a writer and, with her devoted mother taking dictation, she became a journalist-but had to give up her career when her father became ill. Still, Martha created for herself a vast and radiant world-holding dinner parties with the table pushed right up to her iron lung, voraciously reading, running her own household, and caring for her mother when she became ill with Alzheimer's and increasingly abusive to Martha. When voice-activated computers became available, Martha wrote Breath, in part as a tribute to her mother. "This book is her story," writes Anne Rivers Siddons in her preface, "told in the rich words of a born writer. That she told it is a gift to everyone who will read it. That she told it is also as near to a miracle as most are likely to encounter."




Hold My Breath


Book Description

Fractions of seconds can do lots of damage. One decision can ruin lives. A blink can be tragic. And loving a Hollister…can hurt like hell. I would know. They say the average person can hold their breath under water for two full minutes when pushed to the extremes. Will Hollister has been holding his for years. The oldest of two elite swimming brothers, Will was always a dominant force in the water. But in life, he preferred to let his younger brother Evan be the one to shine. Evan got the girl, and Will…he got to bury all of the secrets. A brother’s burden, the weight of it all nearly left him to drown. The daughter of two Olympians, my path was set the day my fingertips first touched water. My future was as crystal clear as the lane I dominated in the pool—swim hard, win big, love a Hollister. My life with Evan burned bright. He gave me arms to come home to, and a smile that fooled the world into believing everything was perfect. But it was Will who pushed me. Will…who really knew me. And when all of the pieces fell, it was Will who started to pick them up. In the end, the only thing that matters are those few precious seconds—and what we decide to do while we still have them in our grasp.




Breath


Book Description

A New York Times Bestseller A Washington Post Notable Nonfiction Book of 2020 Named a Best Book of 2020 by NPR “A fascinating scientific, cultural, spiritual and evolutionary history of the way humans breathe—and how we’ve all been doing it wrong for a long, long time.” —Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Big Magic and Eat Pray Love No matter what you eat, how much you exercise, how skinny or young or wise you are, none of it matters if you’re not breathing properly. There is nothing more essential to our health and well-being than breathing: take air in, let it out, repeat twenty-five thousand times a day. Yet, as a species, humans have lost the ability to breathe correctly, with grave consequences. Journalist James Nestor travels the world to figure out what went wrong and how to fix it. The answers aren’t found in pulmonology labs, as we might expect, but in the muddy digs of ancient burial sites, secret Soviet facilities, New Jersey choir schools, and the smoggy streets of São Paulo. Nestor tracks down men and women exploring the hidden science behind ancient breathing practices like Pranayama, Sudarshan Kriya, and Tummo and teams up with pulmonary tinkerers to scientifically test long-held beliefs about how we breathe. Modern research is showing us that making even slight adjustments to the way we inhale and exhale can jump-start athletic performance; rejuvenate internal organs; halt snoring, asthma, and autoimmune disease; and even straighten scoliotic spines. None of this should be possible, and yet it is. Drawing on thousands of years of medical texts and recent cutting-edge studies in pulmonology, psychology, biochemistry, and human physiology, Breath turns the conventional wisdom of what we thought we knew about our most basic biological function on its head. You will never breathe the same again.




Hold That Breath 2


Book Description

Daksh Sehgal, a corporate employee on a business tour meets Agastya Roy, a writer in the midst of penning a book, in a train coupe. Both are on their way to Kolkata from North East after their respective works and strike up a conversation. It’s a night journey but they aren’t sleepy anymore now so, they decide to kill time. Agastya begins telling Daksh six ghost stories… May 2020. The Covid-19 pandemic has spread around the world and Mumbai is the worst hit in India. Dr. Balagopal Reddy and his nurse, Mancy Varghese meet a peculiar man, Wridhesh Surve during a night shift in the hospital they work in. Every hundred years or so, a pattern is formed and there might just be more to it. Come, meet the beast! Izna Mehra gets arranged to Udarsh Sachdev and moves to the outskirts of Gurgaon. It’s an old secluded house away from the hustle and bustle where Izna discovers a fridge in one of the rooms which is always locked – a fridge full of meat. Udarsh has his own little secret which he might want to share with her that is, only if he gets an opportunity. Basant Agarwal becomes a businessman reluctantly but quite naturally and shifts base from Pune to Panchgani with his wife, Anaisha. It’s a wonderful house that he has bought and there is nobody around – just another house which is seemingly abandoned during the day but comes alive on one night every year. Their neighbour, Harini Srivastava wants to tell them something and invites for a party. Rushil Chatterjee travels from Vancouver to Kolkata after over three decades for some property-related work he can’t skip. His cousin, Laltu requests him to visit their ancestral home in Serampore where his father, an old man on his deathbed has to confess something. Karma always pays back! Tanay and Sushant, two close friends wake up one morning and realize things are different around them in the remote town of Himachal Pradesh. They meet The Transformer who tells them how they can go REVERSE – we all do! Know it. Hold That Breath once again as one of the stories connects the others and fear is unleashed from the mind of the master storyteller and bestselling author. Yours truly, Abhirup Dhar.




Body by Breath


Book Description

In the hierarchy of life, breath always wins. It persists 22,000 times daily, but you get to decide whether the way you breathe is to your benefit or detriment. Breath becomes compromised by stress, disease, and the environmental trappings of progress; you can still breathe under this pressure, but it leads to poor breathing habits that slowly whittle away at your health. In Body by Breath, bestselling author Jill Miller takes you on a journey through your breathing body and presents more than 100 step-by-step techniques and practices to help you master the body-breath connection and reset your physiology. This book explores four primary types of resilience-building exercises—breathwork, movement, rolling, and non-sleep deep rest—to help you achieve • Greater power, endurance, and recovery ability • Enhanced self-regulation skills • Supercharged executive function • Relief from pain, injuries, and chronic conditions • Freedom to feel, connect, and express stored emotions Jill shares her scientifically supported methods so you can Train and modulate your body and nervous system for reduced stress, improved mobility, and whole-body resilience Discover the latest findings in breath and fascia research and get the most out of breathwork practice by including more of your body’s parts in the mix Map the vast reach of the diaphragm and feel how it intermingles with everything in your body. You’ll travel the pathways of the vagus nerve and trace miles of fascial intersections beneath your skin to unlock your body’s regenerative reservoir. If you have struggled with traditional meditation practices because remaining still spikes your anxiety and leaves you feeling agitated and fidgety, Body by Breath presents innovative alternatives designed for your unique nervous system. This inclusive approach allows you to reap the benefits of relaxation, restoration, and regeneration. Take these practices into your life and renew the way you embody breath.




Breath


Book Description

Falling under the spell of an enigmatic extreme-sports surfer, a thrill-seeking pair of western Australian adolescents is initiated into a world of high-stakes adventures and dangerous boundary testing.




A Feather on the Breath of God


Book Description

From Sigrid Nunez, the National Book Award-winning author of The Friend, comes A Feather on the Breath of God: a mesmerizing story about the tangled nature of relationships between parents and children, between language and love A young woman looks back to the world of her immigrant parents: a Chinese-Panamanian father and a German mother. Growing up in a housing project in the 1950s and 1960s, she escapes into dreams inspired both by her parents' stories and by her own reading and, for a time, into the otherworldly life of ballet. A yearning, homesick mother, a silent and withdrawn father, the ballet--these are the elements that shape the young woman's imagination and her sexuality.




How to Breathe Underwater


Book Description

A New York Times notable book and winner of The Northern California Book Award for Best Short Fiction, these nine brave, wise, and spellbinding stories make up this debut. In "When She is Old and I Am Famous" a young woman confronts the inscrutable power of her cousin's beauty. In "Note to Sixth-Grade Self" a band of popular girls exert their social power over an awkward outcast. In "Isabel Fish" fourteen-year-old Maddy learns to scuba dive in order to mend her family after a terrible accident. Alive with the victories, humiliations, and tragedies of youth, How to Breathe Underwater illuminates this powerful territory with striking grace and intelligence. "These stories are without exception clear-eyed, compassionate and deeply moving.... Even her most bitter characters have a gift, the sharp wit of envy. This, Orringer's first book, is breathtakingly good, truly felt and beautifully delivered."—The Guardian