“Tender, immersive, and thrilling." —Gabrielle Zevin

"I can't remember the last time I cared about fictional characters as desperately as I came to care about the beautiful, hilarious and courageous teenage protagonists of Crux." —Elizabeth Gilbert

"One of the best novels I’ve ever read about friendship between a young man and a young woman. It’s also exciting and tension-filled.” —Stephen King

“Breathtaking.” —Chris Whitaker

In this story of intense friendship and grit, two down-and-out teens escape their lives and chase a different future through rock-climbing -- from the New York Times bestselling author of My Absolute Darling.

Dan and Tamma are two teenagers in their last year of high school in the southern Mojave Desert. One is a gifted golden child, the other a mouthy burnout. Climbing boulders in trash-strewn parking lots during cold desert nights, they seal their unique bond and dream of a life of adventure.

As the year progresses and adult reality looms, they are rocked by change and pulled apart by irreconcilable obligations. Differences of class, talent, and prospects take on new importance; options dwindle, and their decisions grow ever more consequential and perilous. It feels inevitable, finally, that something must give.

With a magnificent gift for nature writing and a joyful appreciation for the redemptive power of friendship, Gabriel Tallent gives readers a rollicking, adrenaline-filled, and soul-searching novel about risking everything to change your life.

A novel about the rich stories of small places, from the Nobel Prize–winning, New York Times bestselling author of The Books of Jacob and Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead

A woman settles in a remote Polish village where she knows no one. It has few inhabitants, but it teems with the stories of the living and the dead. There’s the drunk Marek Marek, who discovers that he shares his body with a bird, and Franz Frost, whose nightmares come to him from a newly discovered planet. There’s the man whose death – with one leg on the Polish side, one on the Czech—was an international incident. And there are the Germans who still haunt a region that not long ago they called their own. From the founding of the town to the lives of its saints, these shards piece together not only a history, but a cosmology.

Another brilliant “constellation novel” in the mode of Tokarczuk’s International Booker Prize-winning Flights, House of Day, House of Night reminds us that the story of any place, no matter how humble, is boundless.

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.