The Air You Breathe

The awkward orphan Dorish works in the kitchen of a sugar plantation mansion in northern Brazil. She knows nothing except for the manor house and the surrounding sugarcane fields. But one day, a peer of hers, the owner's daughter -... Grasa, a beautiful, smart, and brazen girl, appears in the house. Dorish and Grasa, girls from different worlds, find themselves connected by loneliness in a remote corner of Brazil, cut off from the rest of the world. Music lives within each of them. One possesses the beautiful voice of a singing bird, while the other composes poems in time with the melodies that resonate inside her. And both dream of immersing themselves in the larger world. Music will become their shared passion, the foundation of their friendship and rivalry, and the only way to escape the life to which they seem condemned. And one day, they succeed. Their intimate, changing connection combined with music will determine their fate. The novel spans several decades, from the 1930s to the present day, moving from the dense Brazilian backcountry to the sparkling, dangerous Rio de Janeiro, and then to Hollywood, filled with music. Samba, both raucous and intimate, loud and barely audible, resonates from every page of this book.