How lifes can intertwine over centuries and locations. This novel, based on historical events, brings it all together. Emotions, action... it's there.
Leipciger does what many attempted but failed in trying. She wrote a small masterpiece.

This was an interesting if depressing read. I'm really glad I had the chance to read it. "Coming up for Air" won't be to everyone's taste but I thought it was really well put together.

This is one of those beautifully indefinable novels which is wonderfully understated. yet has a major impact on the reader.

Spanning three different stories from the end of the 19th century up until the present day, we discover that each tale is connected in some way, with themes running through them that makes you think without making you feel like you're being preached at.

Highly recommended.

Thanks to Netgalley for the ARC without obligation.

Coming Up For Air is Sarah Leipciger’s second novel. It is a beautiful novel, a story of three people living in different countries and in different times. How their stories connect is gradually revealed as the novel progresses. As the author explains at the end of the novel is is a mix of fact and fiction and has its basis in truth. There is grief and loss and despair in each story, but above all, it is about love, and the desire to live.

Each story was compelling and, for once in a book that alternates between the characters, I thought the changes were just at the right moment in each one.

It begins with the unknown young woman in Paris, L’Inconnue, telling the story of her life that led to her suicide. Her death in the Seine is vividly described. As she fell in the cold water, initially she discovered the desire to live, as her body thrashed about not wanting to drown, her lungs fighting for air, for oxygen. It’s poignant and moving, set at the end of the 19th century bringing the city to life, where she lives as a lady’s companion to an old friend of her grandmother’s.

The second story is that of Norwegian, Pieter Akkrehamn, beginning in 1921, when he used to spend his summers with his grandparents on Karmoy Island. He went swimming in the North Sea, diving down several metres, holding his breath for over a minute in the freezing cold water, as the cold reached his chest, squeezing his lungs. His story is revealed, as he grieves for his little son. He is a toymaker, bored with making wooden toys, who turned to soft plastics and began making dolls with soft faces and bendable knees. What he eventually developed was truly remarkable.

The vital importance of being able to breathe comes to the fore in the third story – that of Anouk, a journalist in Canada. Anouk has cystic fibrosis and is on the list for a lung transplant. Her story is one of how she and her parents dealt with her illness, enabling her to combine her love for water and swimming with managing her cystic fibrosis, all the time struggling to breathe.

I think Sarah Leipciger is a great storyteller. It is an inspiring book, beautifully written, which emphasises the importance of the air we breathe and the desire to live. I loved it so much that I hope to read her first novel, The Mountain Can Wait.

With my thanks to NetGalley and to Random House for my review copy.

"Coming up for Air" is an exquisite novel, written in stunning prose, and exploring the themes of love, grief, water, loss, and despair. The narrative moves between past and present, exploring the arcs of three protagonists: a young woman who commits suicide in the Seine in 1899, a Norwegian toymaker grieving the loss of his young son, and a Canadian woman with Cystic Fibrosis.

I loved the way the story moved between the characters, and the links that were established thematically and through the storyline itself. The writing is just beautiful - I had to come up for breath a few times myself as I just found myself lost in it. I am already looking forward to whatever this author writes next.

Thank you to NetGalley and to the publishers, who granted me a free ARC copy of this novel in exchange for an honest review.

After a slow start I was slowly drawn into this book, it goes through the stories of three different people in different decades. Somehow they become intertwined and it does make a interesting read.
I loved the authors note that explains the real people who inspired the characters.
Thank you NetGalley

Coming Up for Air has three different storylines running through it. Each follows a distinct character and takes place across unconnected times and countries. The first of the three stories begins with L’Inconnue in Paris in 1899, the second follows Pieter and starts in 1921 as he spends his summer with his grandparents, and the third is about Anouk who has Cystic Fibrosis. Anouk’s story starts in 2017 as she is about to turn 40, but her story flips between 1987 and her present.

The book not only focuses on these different characters but also differs in how they tell their stories. L’Inconnue is telling the story of her life and her death and how she became known as L’Inconnue. Pieter is telling his story to his son. Anouk is remembering her childhood, and how her parents dealt with her Cystic Fibrosis. Each of these stories is tinged with death and sadness.

L’Inconnue’s life is full of tragedy and yet she tries to remain upbeat and not let things get her down. Each opportunity she accepts also leads to disappointment as she lives in an unrelenting world where she has no power or status. Pieter struggles with his story as he recounts times where he wasn’t always a good person, and although he doesn’t dream of redemption, his actions may allow it. Whereas Anouk’s story is split between her fight to be able to swim and live the life she wants. Nora, Anouk’s mother finds that she has to escape the life she is living, to be able to breathe.

All three stories are focused on water and what it means to these characters. Leipciger allows the water to become both a freeing presence, as well as one full of dangers. The themes of the book are engaging, and you do find yourself caring as it flips between each character. L’Inconnue, Pieter and Anouk feel real as they reach across time, to tell stories of families and beginnings. Each story is well told and gripping, and even if this is a fictionalised story about the unknown woman, it feels like it gives a voice to the voiceless.

Coming Up For Air spans time and continents to give three separate stories pulled together by a common thread. Whimsically, I expected the characters of the stories to meet or link together in some way but the book is not written as a light-hearted fairy tale, it has such depth and intelligence and took me to places of harsh reality, atmosphere and emotion. Each is linked by water, breathing, death and grief.

Sarah Leipciger is a skilful writer and has created an unforgettable story superbly written. If you liked The Light Between Oceans, Once Upon A River and All The Light We Cannot See, you will love Coming Up For Air.

My thanks to Random House U.K. Transworld for an eARC via NetGalley of ‘Coming Up for Air’ by Sarah Leipciger. It was published in March 2020. My apologies for the late feedback.

This novel is quite subtle. It relates three stories, separated by time and space. It is air, the ability to breathe, that obviously links them though as the tales develop a stronger connection is revealed.

Standing on the banks of the River Seine in 1899, L'Inconnue, the unknown woman, takes one final breath before plunging into the icy water. In 1950s Norway, bereaved toy-maker Pieter Akrehamn is working with soft plastics and is on the cusp of an important invention. Finally, in present day Canada Anouk, who has lived her entire life with cystic fibrosis, risks everything for one last chance to live and to at last breathe normally.

I was a little uncertain at first about the format and theme though I was quickly drawn in. By the end I had an aha moment as its three narratives came together. Of the three threads, Anouk’s story from her birth through adulthood is given the most space.

In her Author’s Note Sarah Leipciger relates that aspects of ‘Coming Up For Air’ were based on true stories, notably that of L'Inconnue de la Seine. In the novel she reimagines what might have led her to take her own life. In addition, the character of Pieter was inspired by Norwegian toy maker, Åsmund Laerdal.

The descriptions of L'Inconnue’s drowning along with Anouk’s struggles to breathe were very vivid. Indeed, Anouk’s story while fictional was very inspiring.

Overall, a beautifully crafted blend of historical and contemporary fiction.

I received a free ARC of this book, with thanks to the author, Transworld Books – Random House UK and NetGalley. The decision to review and my opinions are my own

This book is three books in one. with the overall central theme focussed on water. The book is beautifully written almost poetic. A little slow to start, but wonderful when you engross yourself into the story. Recommended. A very powerful read.

Coming Up for Air by Sarah Leipcigar is a fascinating read, merging real events and fiction to create a novel with three different storylines and three different historical and geographical settings. The characterisation is very well done. I found it a bit confusing from time to time as the setting changed but overall I enjoyed it.

My thanks to Netgalley and Transworld, part of Penguin Random House Publishers for the advance copy of this book.

I so wanted to love this as so many other people have raved about it.  Split into three narratives all set in different times and locations, and as is often the case with multiple timelines not all were equally interesting.    The tale of the unnamed woman who travels to Paris to become a companion was one that grabbed me but the more modern timeline with a Canadian cystic fibrosis patient and another with a Norwegian boy in the 50's bored me.

It may be that I was just in the middle of a reading slump and at another time I would have given it more of a chance.

A fascinating story set in three narratives and based on the true story of the origins of the resuscitation mannequin. A drowned woman in late 19th Century Paris, a grieving toymaker in Norway and a Canadian woman awaiting a lung transplant. Many a time I have attended a CPR session and never wondered where the idea for the design of Resus Annie came from, that it had its foundation in a Paris mortuary. Creative storytelling at its best.

Have you heard of the sunken cost fallacy? In the book world, it means: “I might as well finish this book since I’ve spent already two months reading it and I’m already 60% into it.” Well, folks, I thought I had made progress on this issue, but here I was all over again. I agreed to read this book after a friendly (if slightly pushy) marketing email, got the ARC, but I could not muster much enthusiasm. It was probably not a right time for me to read such a sad book, even if it’s well written and interesting.

This novel weaves 3 strands together, which are almost totally independent from one another. (I waited a long time for these strands to get together, but two of them only cross over in the few last chapters, and the third story never crossed the two others). There’s a young maid servant in Paris in 1899, who is slowly but surely driven to suicide by a sad set of circumstances that seem rather banal for the historical period she was living in: poverty, bad luck, meeting the wrong people, yadi yada… This is quite depressing. Then there’s a girl who grows up in Canada and who has cystic fibrosis, which seriously curtails her life expectancy. This is very depressing. Then there’s a man in Sweden in the 1950s, who narrates his story directly to his child, and we soon understand that this child has died. Possibly even more depressing.

I know what people could answer: that in the end we learn that something good and life-bringing has come out of those tragedies, but for me it was too little and too late. I don’t deal well with child death in fiction, and I feel that there should have been a trigger warning somewhere in the ARC marketing materials, because I would have known that this was not the book for me. But since I was about 60% in, I clenched my teeth and finished it, but it wasn’t fun. The fact that the three stories are loosely woven together does actually interrupt the flow of reading, and so I remained emotionally distant from the characters.

I guess that reading this book in other circumstances might have made me more patient, because the writer obviously writes very well and put a lot of emotions and research and details into her stories. It didn’t work well for me, but I don’t want to stop others from taking up this book as long as they’re emotionally ready.

Thanks to the publisher and Netgalley. I received a free copy of this book for review consideration.

Do you have CPR certificate? Do you have First Aid cert? I do. I’ve done it numerous times throughout my working life. And have never for the life of me paid any attention to the face of the mannequin trainers used to show us how to administer CPR.

Moverover, to take such a mundane, accidental story as the story of CPR mannequin face and to build it and weave it into something magical… one needs to be a witch or a wizard of human soul. Coming Up For Air by Sarah Leipciger is such a story.

Three stories. Three bodies of water. Three drownings. One would think how it can all be connected and weaved into one story with the begining and the end…. But it can.

All three stories are about loss and drowning, looking for salvation and finding it in the most unexpected places.

End of 19th century and girls kills herself by jumping into Seine. Her face ends up on a mask. Mask ends up all over the world.

Middle of 20th Century, a father loses his boy to the lake. Father makes toys. Father explores plastics’ capabilities. Mask of the drowned French L’Inconnue de la Seine girl ends up in his hands… and ends up on the face of Resusci Anne

21 century Canada a girl drowns in her lungs but finds escape and muddy haven between the banks of river.

Coming Up For Air is about looking to breathe. It is about unseemly, ugly but so real layers of human life and existence from coughing up flem to placenta and morning sickness, from mud of the river floor to freezing salt of North Sea.

This book is a very heavy and emotionally-draining. It is very much ‘in your face’ and ‘through your heart’. All three stories take out chunks of your soul. They are as much about the characters as they are about flows and currents, colours of the water and scent of death.

This read has proven to be engrossing and disgusting, in places and for that even more engrossing. The characters are not afraid of pain and do not shy away from miniscular details of drowning, death and decay.

‘… life may be rich and long or it may be tedious. It may be a disaster – it’s a gamble. But the only certainty is that will end, and when it does, you find yourself the river again. River is life and death both’.

Coming Up For Air is a magical story of unknown woman who lives for eternity and beyond only because she’s drown and is now rescuing others drowing in water or otherwise. Having finished this read one would need to be coming up for air.

I gave this book 5 stars.

Coming Up for Air by Sarah Leipciger tells stories linked by water, breath and rejuvenation. One of the difficulties of these entwined narratives is when you enjoy one more than the others and I would have happily spent more time with the one set in Paris at the end of the nineteenth century.
I admire the scope of the novel and the connections made between the different tales - this is a clever, ambitious and intriguing book.

A really interesting concept for a tale that is based, in part, on true facts. I did struggle initially to understand the concept of the several tales because I was expecting them to be interconnecting. As someone who has used these mannequins to both learn and teach, I found it a fascinating concept that there was a human element behind the face. Definitely worth a read for the stories alone, as well as the human interest.

Coming Up For Air is an absolutely spell-binding book, inspired by a true story. At first I couldn't begin to imagine how three characters, from three different countries, from different time periods even, could possibly be linked. The common theme between all three appeared to be water, loss and regret. As the story continues, the reader gets drawn into the worlds of L'Inconnue (the unknown woman); Pieter, a toy maker from Norway; and Anouk, a young woman from Canada. This is the sort of book that makes you forget all that is going on around you. You become so invested in each person's story, and as the link between the three becomes clear, it will captivate and grip you. I truly adored this story. The writing was sublime, the plot fascinating. And perhaps most interesting of all is the true event that inspired it. Not giving anything away here, but I highly recommend this book to lovers of literary fiction.

Sarah Leipciger writes a beautifully imagined novel of life, love, loss, grief, sorrow and despair, intertwining the themes of air, the precious breath of life itself, water, death, and mortality. She weaves fact and fiction into her delicate connections between the L'Inconnue de la Seine, the unknown young woman who commits suicide in the River Seine in 1899, a Norwegian toy maker working in soft plastics in the 1950s, Pieter Akrehamn, hollowed out by grief from the loss of his beloved little boy, Bear, and the more contemporary collector of stories and journalist, the Canadian Anouk, born with Cystic Fibrosis, drowning in her own lungs, living a life of restrictions and limitations, in constant danger, managing to exceed the expectations of her life span to face the risks of undergoing a lung transplant at the age of 40 for the chance to really live and breathe. They are the rivers, the seas, the salt, the lakes, the breath, in the inextricable circles of life and death, where drowning is a quiet, private and unremarkable affair.

This story shifts from past and present in a non-linear narrative, recounting the making of the death mask of the L'Inconnue, a mask of a young woman transcending time and death to serve as a muse to countless writers. Her mask goes on to serve as the inspiration, to be kissed by millions in the future, used by and the the source of Pieter's Rescuci Anne, the doll used to train people for lifesaving CPR, commissioned by two Baltimore anesthetists, responsible for going on to save an enormous number of individuals globally. The author provides a backstory for L'Inconnue, a life of doomed love, blackmail and shame, a birth that meant death for her mother, with flashbacks of her childhood. She takes up a position in Paris as a companion to the paranoid Madame Debord, suspecting everyone of being a thief, weighed down by a history of 7 pregnancies, all lost. Anouk is the wild river girl, willing to risk all to swim, cared for by mother, Nora, homesick for Toronto, and her father, Red, who dies when she is 19 of pancreatic cancer.

Tinged with a sense of melancholy, Leipciger captures with skill the characters she creates, drawing on actual events and history for her compelling and tantalisingly timeless storytelling of the waters of life and death, the necessity and fragility of breath. She immerses us in the lives of L'Innconnue, Pieter, Anouk and Rescuci Anne, culminating in the final connection of Camille Debord. Amidst the background of the landscape of rivers and the sea, so fundamental to humans, Leipciger animates her characters lives with her rich and melodic descriptions and artful prose so beautifully. A wonderfully riveting read that I recommend highly. Many thanks to Random House Transworld for an ARC.

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).