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Vendor
Liepman Literary Agency
Marc Koralnik
Original language
English

THE TRICK IS TO KEEP BREATHING

Janice Galloway

Galloway invites us into the mind of a woman on the edge, in a novel which "resembles Tristram Shandy as rewritten by Sylvia Plath" (New York Times)

From the corner of a darkened room Joy Stone watches herself. Memories of deaths – her married lover and her mother – re-surface and boil over. Life has become all about finding the trick to keep going. Told with shattering clarity and wry wit, this is a Scottish classic fit for our time.

Janice Galloway was born in Ayrshire in 1955. She is the author of three novels, three collections of short stories and two memoirs. She has been writer in residence to four Scottish prisons, Research Fellow to the British Library, resident at Jura Distillery, and was recently the first Fellow in Residence at the University of Otago in New Zealand. Her radio work includes two series for BBC (LIFE AS A MAN and IMAGINED LIVES) and programmes on music and musicians. She also works extensively with musicians, visual artists and typographers.
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Book

Published 1989-05-11 by Polygon

Comments

Cambourakis

"Claustrophobic but extraordinary."

"Galloway catches detail perfectly and can create vivid impressions in a word or two."

Beletrina

"She provides sentences blazing with light, a gorgeous draft of terror."

Encore

"An account from the inside of a mind cracking up its writing is as taut as a bowstring. From brilliant title to closing injunction, it hums with intelligence, clarity, wit; and, its heroine's struggle for order and meaning seduces our minds, exposes how close we all of us are to insanity. Joy, as Galloway's heroine reluctantly lets us know that she's called, is simply that dangerous step or two nearer the edge."

"Resembles Tristram Shandy as rewritten by Sylvia Plath."

"Unsentimental, caustic, brilliantly observed ... The trick of her writing is how easy she makes it seem, how artfully she restructures and transforms the ordinary."