A Single Breath

by Lucy Clarke

[Leah]

I actually missed the boat on Lucy Clarke’s debut novel The Sea Sisters when it was released last year, I’m sure it’s on my Kindle somewhere, but I didn’t get a chance to read it, something I now regret as it was chosen as a Richard & Judy pick and was a massive, instant success. So I was quite pleased to receive an early copy of her second novel A Single Breath, and not wanting to miss out on Lucy’s fantastic writing, I knew I had to read it as quickly as I possibly could and a week off from work was just the perfect excuse I needed to pick the book up! And, boy, am I glad I read the novel because it was magnificent – twisty, captivating, and just when I thought it was all over, and no more secrets could be told, and what I’d thought wasn’t going to come true, bang! In came another secret, another reveal.

I have to be honest and say that A Single Breath reminded me of another novel, but since I cannot remember which novel this is, I can’t really compare the two as well as I might. But it did remind me of another book and I’m sure it will pop into my head which novel it is. It’s such a clever novel, that pretty much had me hooked from the word go, with the Prologue that introduces us to Jackson, Eva’s husband, and then we down to Jackson’s death, after being swept off the rocks where he was fishing by a freak wave. It knocks Eva off her feet, and the only thing she knows is that instead of being around her family, she wants to be around his family, so she heads off to his homeland of Tasmania, but the one thing she isn’t expecting is the cold welcome from his dad, Dirk, and his brother, Saul. Just why don’t they want Eva to spend any time in Wattleboon, where Jackson grew up.

I was sucked into A Single Breath almost immediately and I was definitely trying to work out Jackson, who was quite the enigma! I had my own theories as to what was going on, some that proved right, and some that I didn’t expect at all, so it was quite nice to see it all unravel and to see Eva discovering the truth about her husband, even if it wasn’t quite what she wanted to hear (no one wants to know their husband has lied to them, no matter the lie, am I right?) and I was sort of heartbroken on behalf of Eva that what she believed wasn’t necessarily the truth when it came to Jackson. I did, however, enjoy Saul and Eva’s friendship, if I can call, it that because it’s very tentative at first – Eva wants to know more about Jackson, Saul doesn’t want her to know, and so they’re very much avoiding the real questions for the first bit of the novel but once the trust comes into it, and they became closer, I very much enjoyed their interactions. The free-diving, the trips they took, the squid-tagging, it was nice that something good could come from something so bad. Saul sounded delightful, and it’s always nice to have a bit of eye-candy in books, although it was sort of awkward, since he was Jackson’s brother ya know?

My absolute favourite bit about A Single Breath (apart from the cracking twists) was the Tasmanian setting. I am a sucker for a novel set somewhere warm, beautiful and relatively unpopulated and quiet and Wattleboon sounded right up my alley. I couldn’t help but imagine myself going out swimming every morning and watching the sun rise and set, it all sounded so delightful. The twists in A Single Breath were superb and plentiful. Just when I thought there wasn’t anywhere else for the novel to go, it went there and it worked. And it worked without being trite or too over the top, which isn’t easy to do. Lucy Clarke is very much a talented writer – I flew through the novel, captivated by the writing, and the characters, and the beautiful setting. Third-person narratives don’t usually resonate with me as much as first-person but somehow Lucy Clarke managed it here and I raced through the book, desperate for poor Eva to catch a break and I did feel so bad that she had so much to discover about her husband. Part of me was sorta glad, though, because I really fell for Saul and Eva and felt they would work so well as a couple. (It was super confusing.) It was such a fascinating, enjoyable book, and all of the glowing blurbs are very true about Lucy as a writer, she’s amazing and I can’t wait to go back and devour The Sea Sisters because A Single Breath was an immense read.