> Skip to content
  • Published: 26 March 2014
  • ISBN: 9780141197371
  • Imprint: Penguin Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 192
  • RRP: $22.99

A Breath of Life




A sensational and mystical novel from one of the 20th century's greatest modernist writers

A Breath of Life is Clarice Lispector's final novel, 'written in agony', which she did not live to see published. Sensual and mysterious, it is a mystical dialogue between a god-like author and the creation he breathes life into: the speaking, shifting, indefinable Angela Pralini. As he has created Angela, so, eventually, he must let her die, for life is merely 'a kind of madness that death makes.' This is a unique, elegiac meditation on the creation of life, and of art.

  • Published: 26 March 2014
  • ISBN: 9780141197371
  • Imprint: Penguin Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 192
  • RRP: $22.99

Also by Clarice Lispector

See all

Praise for A Breath of Life

A text that resonates endlessly ... her images dazzle

The Times Literary Supplement

Lispector had an ability to write as though no one had ever written before

Colm Tóibín

A thrilling book

Pedro Almodóvar