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  • Published: 31 October 2011
  • ISBN: 9781448105458
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 480

The Town That Forgot How To Breathe



'A novel of dazzling ambition and strange, haunting loveliness. Grippingly entertaining and bursting with life, it is an absolute triumph of the storyteller's art. Many books are hyped as "unputdownable". This one really is' Joseph O'Connor

Bareneed, Newfoundland, home to a vivid cast of characters who, one by one, come down with a mysterious breathing disorder. As the illness progresses, its victims fall into silence and are gripped by dark thoughts and urges. Meanwhile, the once-thriving cod fishery has been shut down and people find their nets full of bizarre creatures - the incarnations of legendary beasts and characters that existed in the village's tales for generations. One old-timer, Eileen Laracy, gradually makes the connection: the act of breathing is no longer automatic for the inhabitants of Bareneed - out of place and time, they have lost a fundamental part of their identity.

  • Published: 31 October 2011
  • ISBN: 9781448105458
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 480

About the author

Kenneth J Harvey

Kenneth J Harvey is the author of several novels including The Town That Forgot How To Breathe, Brud, Nine Tenths Unseen (praised by J. M. Coetzee as 'a harrowing journey into the dark underside of family life'), Blackstrap Hawco and Reinventing the Rose. His books are published in ten countries. He has won the Thomas Raddall Atlantic Fiction Award and has been nominated for the Books in Canada First Novel Award, the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, and twice for both the Giller Prize and the Commonwealth Writers Prize. He lives lives in St. John's and an outport on the Island of Newfoundland.

Praise for The Town That Forgot How To Breathe

A novel of dazzling ambition and strange, haunting loveliness. Grippingly entertaining and bursting with life, it is an absolute triumph of the storyteller's art. Many books are hyped as "unputdownable". This one really is.

Joseph O'Connor