Coming up for Air gives us three narratives set across time and continents that weave together all centered around breath and air. 1899 France, 1950's Norway and present day Canada. It shows us the impact of everyday life and the extensive influence our existence has on humanity around us without ever entirely knowing so.

It is beautifully written and highly descriptive. It took me a few days to get into the story, but I was hooked by the second half which I finished over the course of a morning. I adored the narratives set in France and Norway, they merged together beautifully and were also fascinating as standalone tales. The third thread whilst lovely, seemed slightly disjointed and didn't link to the other two threads as well as I expected (other than having the breath/air connection).

I thoroughly enjoyed this beautifully written and original novel, which weaves together the stories of three protagonists in three different countries in three different eras. Although the narrative connections between them are not obvious, what does connect them are the themes of the book – water, drowning, breathing. In the first story set in Paris in 1899 a young woman throws herself into the Seine. In 1950s Norway a grieving father, a toy maker, is experimenting with a new material, plastic. And in contemporary Canada a young journalist with cystic fibrosis prepares to take a risk with her health. All live life on the edge, where breathing cannot be taken for granted. I don’t want to say too much about what happens to each of these characters, as the less known beforehand the more powerful the impact on the reader. Each of the stories is equally compelling, and the author is a marvellous storyteller, in control of her disparate narratives and with a fine ear for dialogue and a deep empathy for those suffering from loss and grief. A remarkable book, with not a word wasted or a word out of place. Highly recommended.

Coming Up For Air is a really interesting book, in that it gives a life to the face of the resuscitation dummy, Resusci Anne. The original mask was the death mask of a suicide victim in Paris in 1899, and Leipciger tells the background story of a girl who decides to take her own life when her life becomes unbearable.

We also meet the Norwegian toy maker who designs Resusci Anne, and the things that happened in his life that brought him to that point. His is an equally sad story, and although he has been fictionalised, he has been based om the real man who made the doll.

The third story is that of a Canadian girl with cystic fibrosis, and her journey from childhood up until she becomes a journalist as an adult.

This is a book about transformations: the French maid is transformed in to a mask that will be recognised around the world over a hundred years after her death; a toy maker is transformed after the death of his beloved son, into someone who tries to ensure that everyone has the ability for such things not to happen again; and a woman with cystic fibrosis has a literal transformation with the promise of renewed, transplanted lungs.

This novel sucked me in to all three lives and times. Both the French girls and the child’s death devastated me, and the Canadian woman’s story was one of hope (although I was pretty much dreading the idea that something bad would happen to her).

I loved this book, and I feel lucky to have read it. I would most definitely recommend it.

The most amazing story, well told. Haven't stopped thinking about this one, and have recommended to my friends. You won't regret time spent with this book.

Absolutely stunning and unusual novel - for most of the duration it feels like reading three unrelated books which can be distracting, but the way the author ultimately brings them together makes it all make sense. The strands are moving in their own right, the whole even more so. The writing is exquisite.

On the banks of the River Seine in 1899, a heartbroken young woman takes her final breath before plunging into the icy water.
The book takes poetic licence with the story of L'Inconnue de la Seine, who is an unidentified young woman whose body was pulled out of the River Seine in Paris around the 1880s.
The woman remained as such unknown, but her face is now immortalised as Resuscitation Annie, the doll we practice CPR on. The author gives her a life and a beautiful back story that is endearing, intimate and unsurprisingly tragic.
Leipciger decides to intertwine 2 other separate stories in different times that are related essentially by tragedy and water. This includes a Canadian Journalist living with Cystic Fibrosis in the 1980’s, hoping for a transplant, but teetering with the risk of her lungs filling and being unable to breathe. The third story is set in Norway in the 1950’s where a toymaker and his wife lose their son on the banks of a river and try to make sense and regain purpose in their life.
Each story is very moving. The writing is poetic and intriguing, generating evocative tales across the 3 different eras. I cannot fault its quality. However the jumping back and forth between these times and characters, was hugely disruptive. Perhaps it was because they were different stories unrelated other than by survival against the thematic of water. But it did interrupt the flow of very delicate discourses that seemed out of kilter and stilted its flow.
Having said that the haunting narrative was a delight to lose yourself in. Melancholic, yet calm and peaceful it allows you reflect upon the beautiful fragility of life.

There are three separate stories tied together in Coming Up for Air by the common themes of water, drowning, air and resuscitation.

We begin with an anonymous girl in France, drowning herself by jumping into the Seine. The story then tracks back over the events in her life that led her to that tipping point, whilst keeping her identity concealed from the reader. This story is a fictional imagining of a real figure, as an anonymous girl did indeed drown in the Seine and her death mask was used as the basis for the resuscitation doll that is used to teach CPR, and has saved the life of many a drowning victim since then.

Interspersed with this tale of comfortable servitude and doomed love is a heartbreaking story of a toy-making father in Norway who has experienced the tragedy of a loved one drowning and is inspired to turn his skills towards creating something useful, using the beautiful anonymous death mask he has inherited as a template.

The third story belongs to Anouk, in Canada in the 80s, as she lets us into the intimate details of her life with cystic fibrosis: drowning in her own body’s mucous daily and obsessed with swimming in natural waters whenever possible. We also get glimpses into the pain of her mother, Nora, as she attempts to negotiate happiness out of a life committed to each breath taken by another.

All three stories have a haunting sadness about them, as they all tell of young lives limited by drowning in some form or another. The stories weave in and out of each other, but never really come together into a cohesive whole, as there is only Resusci-Anne and lungs full of water to connect them. However the writing is poetically beautiful and captures the minutiae of a young girl’s life in Paris, the unbearable ache of parental grief, and the stunning shock of icy cold water on a beleaguered young body.

Sarah Leipciger has taken a kernel of fact, and written in a fascinating fictional backstory that leaps between decades and continents, showing us that lives can be linked in unexpected ways, completely unknown to ourselves.



This is how I drowned. I stood beneath the arch of the Pont Alexandre III, on the Left Bank of the slick and meandering Seine. Moonsilver, cold. I took off my coat and boots, and folded my coat neatly, and laid it over my boots, which I lined up side by side with the tips pointing down to the water. I stood quietly for a few minutes, watching the surface of the river form soft little peaks that folded into themselves again and again and again.

I took a step closer to the water so I could peer down its throat. But this was the gut of the night, and even with the moonlight, the water was an opaque, bottomless thing. Not for the first time, I climbed into the underbelly of the bridge, and shuffled along the arch, hugging the pillars, towards the middle where the river was deeper. There was the smell of rust and cold steel and there was the smell of the river and there was a chance that, in this moment, things could have gone differently. A small sign from the world to tell me it would rather I stayed than left. The nasal call of some rook. A shooting star, a whistling boatman, a change in the wind. Nothing happened. So. I leaned forward, expelled my last breath, and let myself fall. The black water closed over my head like a toothless mouth.

– Sarah Leipciger, Coming Up For Air

Review by Steph Warren of Bookshine and Readbows blog

I'm grateful to the publisher and to NetGalley for a free advance e-copy of this book.

And now for something (for me) completely different.

Coming Up For Air tells three stories, taking place in late 19th century Paris, mid-20th century Norway and late20th/ early 21st century Canada.

We see a young woman - never named, she is literally referred to as L'Inconnue (the Unknown Woman) - travel to Paris and take up a post as companion to Madame Debord, a suspicious ('She may have been paranoid but she was still a Parisienne'), irascible older widow (older than L'Inconnue, that is, and by the judgement of the time, "old").

In Norway, Pieter Åkrehamn is a young child in the 1920s and later a grown man in the 40s and 50s. It becomes clear that he is narrating his life story - a story balanced between a love of the Northern seas and lakes, of swimming in the cold water until just before it begins to kill and between a constant, haunting grief.

And in Canada, Anouk grows up in the 80s, a girl with cystic fibrosis. Leipciger describes, not a tragedy bravely borne or any other cliche, but the day to day practical difficulties for her and for her parents. Again there is a fascination with the outdoors, with swimming now in the rivers and lakes, even the polluted Lake Toronto. (The chapters focussing on Anouk interleave with those on her mother, Nora, but these two sections are much closer to each other than the rest of the book).

Each story - and they are very different - is narrated with a crystal clear eye for detail ('the hard rainfall of a piano being played mezzo-forte', 'granite like the story of the Earth'), a studied appreciation of, and empathy for, the tiny events and incidents of everyday life. L'Inconnue's takes place over the shortest period but documents her growing up - coming to Paris as a "provincial", learning how to live there ('this was my first city, and it was Paris': there that sense here of Paris as more than a place, as a civilisation) becoming increasingly confident and self-assured, discovering love ('She had a beautiful potted belly, and if a hundred cakes would have given me a belly like that I would have eaten every one of them') but - not a spoiler as this is the first scene we encounter - throwing herself into the Seine in despair. Anouk's story parallels L'Inconnue's, we see her growing up, a happy child, through medical crises, finding her feet, weathering her parents' increasing distance, but, also, coming to a crisis point where her condition requires a lung transplant.

Bridging the two, Pieter's story spans the longest period and forms a critical bridge in the book though it also forms the shortest part of the book. Pieter's account is wrapped round a loss and is perhaps the most intense of the three, telling of a grief, almost while not addressing it. It was incredibly moving.

Three different stories yet they have some common themes. Both Pieter's and Anouk's stories touch on men - husbands, fathers - who seen self reliant and in control but who at critical moments are actually absent or absent-while-present: they don't know what to do, they freeze. It's Anouk's mother who deal with the dead deer, it's Pieter's wife who saves the house from fire (and who copes with the difficult child when he can't). These are significant moment but Leipciger doesn't make them simplistic turning points in the narrative or in relationships.

Similarly, the idea of water, of immersion, runs through all three narratives. For Anouk it's both a balm, helping her live with her condition and - if the warning signs are not heeded - a danger. The margin is slight, as we see also with Pieter when he swims out too far. And L'Inconnue too develops a fascination for the Seine before that final plunge.

And, of course, there is death. Actual deaths, as the loved are borne away, sometimes overtly marked - a joyous funeral in Canada - sometimes not, as when unclaimed corposes are exhibited in the Paris Morgue, visited by L'Inconnue and her lover - sometimes simply passed over, as with a boy who dies unseen. Deaths garnished with rumour and fancy. Deaths that afford life to others, as transplant donors or the inspiration for life saving innovations. Potential deaths, close escapes: the book explores that margin, that grey area, discussing the idea of resuscitation, the limited time when death can be averted, undone.

There's an idea behind this, I think, the symmetry of life and death - life as a brief interruption to death, rather than the other way round: 'Where we are, I think it's like a river and you're the flow. And every so often, out of the flow, you, me - all of us - we crawl up on to the bank and we do life... River is life and death both'.

At a time of uncertainty and indeed death, it's actually a rather uplifting thought to take from this very beautiful, absorbing book. I would strongly recommend.

This is an unusual book. It ties together a number of stories in a way that is original and based partly on fact. In 1899 a young girl jumps off a bridge into the Seine. The events that led her to this act form part of a narrative. Anouk is a journalist who has spent her life gasping for air as she is suffering from Cystic Fibrosis & frequently feels as if she us drowning. A toy maker who is at the forefront of using mould able plastics works long hours to try & forget the loss of his son to drowning. When he is asked to make a face for an educational device to instruct people in resuscitation techniques he comes across the death mask of an unknown girl who drowned in the Seine.

The diverse stories of these people make for interesting reading. Thanks to Netgalley & the publisher for letting me read & review this book.

I had no idea this book was based on real events until I’d almost finished reading it. I love books that span more than one time and this book focuses on 1899, the 1950’s and present times. Each era deals with the story of a different character, linked in ways that are gradually revealed. I enjoyed the thread set in Paris in 1899 the best and would have easily read a whole novel about L'Inconnue de la Seine (which I’d never heard of before). This story and the 19050’s story are closer and more obviously linked than the present one. The stories are linked through themes such as breathing, rivers and drowning. This is a beautifully written and haunting book. I’m glad I took a chance on it.

I enjoyed all three story strands in Coming Up for Air although the link with Anouk's felt a little more tenuous. My favourite was the Parisian one and I could happily have read an entire novel following the story of L'Inconnue de la Seine. The first two stories taken together offer a fascinating insight into the history of Resusci Annie.

This book has 3 distinct storylines, all featuring different characters and tied together by the need for air. The premise is great, and it’s well written. Unfortunately I just couldn’t get into this but I’m not sure why.....I think it lacked coherence and the characterisation I felt was quite weak. This one wasn’t for me I’m afraid.

In 1898 in Paris an unnamed woman starts a new life. In post-War Norway a father converses with his dead son. in Canada young parents come to terms with the fact that their daughter has a terrible inherited condition. The woman in Paris loves and loses and throws herself off a bridge into the river. The Norwegian, a toymaker, develops realistic soft-plastic and is asked to collaborate on a piece of medical equipment. The Canadian woman risks all for a chance at a longer life.
These three stories seem to only have the most tenuous of links, an obsession with water, for most of the book. Then realisation dawns on the reader and this book becomes something else, how lives can be linked by the simplest of things and out of tragedy hope can arise. Each story is touching on its own but brought together this story is greater than the sum of its parts and very clever.

This book, though beautifully written, did not hold my interest, and sadly I didn’t really enjoy it.
The three very different storylines appear to have no common thread connecting them, apart from a lack of air. The narratives are not all interesting, unfortunately, certainly not enough to hold this reader’s attention to the end, so I did not finish it.
My thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for my advance copy of this title.

I was sent a copy of Coming Up for Air by Sarah Leipciger to read and review by NetGalley.
What a beautiful book, beautifully written. I loved every minute of it, even the sad and poignant bits! Fabulous characters that danced off the page and landscapes that you could feel immersed in. One of the most satisfying books I’ve read this year so far. Enjoy!

'Coming Up for Air' is a beautiful novel. It is poetic and haunting and will stay with me. Three stories intertwine through the book. I loved the story of L'Inconnue de la Seine and I wish the whole book had been devoted to her. I also enjoyed Pieter's story, though it was hard to read at times. The third story was a slog for me with no real connections and I lost interest in these passages. However the book as a whole is full of rich imagery and is beautifully written.

There's no doubt this is a beautifully written, almost lyrical book. There is no central theme. There isn't one main event the story is centred around. Instead we get accounts of 4 seemingly disparate people and their very different lives. I was waiting to see at what point their stories would merge, and, no spoilers here, that does and also doesn't eventually happen! If that's confusing then you'll have to read the book yourself to see. I enjoyed it very much and even though it wasn't in any way the book I thought I was getting, I loved the way it was written, the careful thought put into the placement of every precisely honed word. Very different and unique, I was entranced and captivated in equal measure.

A reflective novel linked by water.

‘Coming Up For Air’ is a rather clever concept of three individual people’s tales woven together, where all are linked by water.

I was particularly drawn in with the first tale, set in Paris in 1899, centred around the River Seine. It features an unknown young woman... (L’Inconnue) ... whose story is beautifully crafted by Sarah Leipciger. This young woman’s life is tough and the author cleverly weaves her trials and tribulations, leading up to a rather untimely ending, which strangely was the catalyst to an interesting chain of events.

The second and third tales are interwoven in all the chapters, which was sometimes bothersome, especially when I really wanted to hear more about L’Inconnue.

However, the life of a Norwegian toy maker, who is on the cusp of an amazing impactful invention, is intrinsically linked to the third main character in Canada, where we learn of the distressing disease, cystic fibrosis.

These three main characters span over a century in time, whereby they are all challenged by so many raw human emotions, pushing them to the peak of mortal endurance. Although I usually prefer the crime/ thriller genre, I awarded four stars due to Leipciger’s powerful, poignant style.

Galadriel.

Elite Reviewing Group received a copy of this book to review.

Beautifully written. This story about 3 different people is a bit long in places but overall it was a pleasure to read. So much is told about their individual lives. I will have to take a good look at a CPR mannequin next time I see one.

Thank you to Netgalley for my copy.

Next time I go to update my CPR certificate I will look at the resuscitation dummy in a totally different way. Who knew that her face is derived from the death mask of an unknown suicide victim in Paris in 1899. Fact - and her fictional story is just part of this beautiful book.

Three stories are told in all, each loosely linked by the themes of water and drowning. As well as the imagined life of the beautiful French girl we read about a toymaker in Norway who, in the 1950's, used her death mask to create the very first dummy he called Resusci Anne. He had a very personal involvement in the need to teach everyone how to resuscitate someone who has stopped breathing. That teaching still goes on to this day and it must have saved many lives.

The third story is of a Canadian journalist in modern times who has Cystic Fibrosis and practically drowns in her own lungs. I have no personal knowledge of this disease but feel that the author had done her research and the details are spelled out painfully but also sensitively.

The writing is beautiful. The changes from one story to another are smooth and clear. All three stories are equally compelling reading. There are many sad moments and there are also uplifting ones which give us hope. I thought this was a lovely, lovely book.