Deep Breath

A visceral and stirring novel exploring free will, memory, faith, and constructions of reality and the self, following a woman faced with the question of whether her marriage is abusive, and the life-altering decision of ending it

When we meet Vera, her body and mind are on a precipice. She’s just left her marital home to live with her father after her husband’s violent outbursts reach a breaking point. She’s experiencing sudden losses of consciousness, spells of insomnia and difficulty eating. Over the course of the year that follows, she reignites a high school romance, looks to her divorced parents for guidance, attempts couples therapy, struggles to mother two young daughters, develops a brief cocaine dependency, and tries to rekindle her artistic practice--all while questioning, in Halász’s immediate, intimate prose, the infinite number of choices that led her to this difficult moment.

Towards the end of the novel, we follow Vera into a surreal funhouse mirror of a courtroom scene, equally comical and horrifying, where she must confront the many conflicting narratives of her marriage and separation and decide which one rings true.

With the emotional precision and formal elegance reminiscent of Natalia Ginzburg and Elena Ferrante, Halász offers a meditation on agency, subjectivity, motherhood, and the artistic vocation with an ultimately optimistic conclusion: life consists of forward movement, in which the biggest challenge--and privilege--is choice.

RITA HALÁSZ is a Hungarian writer and art historian. Deep Breath, her debut novel, won the 2021 Margó Prize and was shortlisted for the Libri Literary Prize.

KRISTEN HERBERT is a writer and translator from the Chicago area. Her translations of contemporary Hungarian literature have been published in New Delta Review, Waxwing, Newfound, Asymptote, and Columbia Journal Online. She is the co-founder and editor of the bilingual Hungarian-English print journal The Penny Truth.