Breath

Breath is the twentieth book and eighth novel by Australian author Tim Winton. His first novel in seven years, it was published in 2008, in Australia, New Zealand, the UK, the US, Canada, the Netherlands, and Germany. Plot summary The novel is set in a small Western Australian logging village named Sawyer, near the fictional coastal town of Angelus, which has featured in several of Winton's works, including Shallows and The Turning. It is narrated by Bruce "Pikelet" Pike, a divorced, middle-aged paramedic, and takes the form of a long flashback in which he remembers childhood experiences of friendship with another boy, of surfing under the mentorship of an older surfing champion, and of repeated statutory rape by the older surfer's wife. The main events of the novel takes place in the 1970s. Before the main events of the story take place, the opening chapter depicts a scene of two paramedics responding to an emergency call. The older paramedic, who is the narrator, immediately recognises that the boy that they have been called to help is dead as a result of hanging himself. The paramedic consoles the disconsolate mother who asks him how she will explain his death. After leaving, the younger paramedic says that it was the first suicide she had encountered, but the narrator says that it was not a suicide, without explaining that it had been an accident resulting from an autoerotic asphyxiation. The story then shifts to the narrator's childhood. The narrator, Bruce "Pikelet" Pike, recounts his boyhood friendship with Ivan "Loonie" Loon. They first meet when eleven-year-old Pikelet stumbles across Loonie pretending to drown in a river in order to frighten a young family sitting nearby. The boys bond over their love for dangerous stunts, despite being the polar opposites of each other. They form a tight friendship and spend the majority of their time together. The two boys witness a group of young men surfing a gigantic wave and are inspired to pick up surfing as a hobby. They then meet a professional surfer named Bill "Sando" Sanderson, who encourages them to pursue this ambition and offers to teach them both how to surf. The trio bond quickly and the boys are constantly over at Sando's house, which is a treehouse in the middle of the Australian bush, shared by Sando's American wife Eva Sanderson.