#1 NEW YORK Instances BESTSELLER • PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST • This inspiring, exquisitely observed memoir finds wish and beauty when confronted with insurmountable odds as an idealistic young neurosurgeon tries to answer the question What makes a life worthy of living?

NAMED ONE OF PASTE’S BEST MEMOIRS FROM THE DECADE • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE ENTIRE YEAR BY THE BRAND NEW York Times Reserve Review • People • NPR • The Washington Post • Slate • Harper’s Bazaar • Time Out about When Breath Becomes Air New York • Publishers Regular • BookPage

Finalist for the PEN Middle USA Literary Award in Creative non-fiction as well as the Books for a Better Life Prize in Inspirational Memoir

At the age of thirty-six, around the verge of completing a decade’s well worth of training as a neurosurgeon, Paul Kalanithi was identified as having stage IV lung cancer. 1 day he was a doctor treating the dying, and the next he was an individual struggling to live. And just like that, the future he and his wife had thought evaporated. When Breathing Becomes Atmosphere chronicles Kalanithi’s transformation from a naïve medical college student “possessed,” as he published, “from the query of what, given that all organisms perish, makes a virtuous and significant life” into a neurosurgeon at Stanford working in the brain, the most significant place for human identity, and finally into a individual and new dad confronting his very own mortality.

What makes lifestyle worth surviving in the facial skin of death? What now ? when the future, no longer a ladder toward your targets in existence, flattens out into a perpetual present? What does it mean to have a kid, to nurture a new life as another fades away? These are some of the questions Kalanithi wrestles with with this profoundly shifting, exquisitely noticed memoir.

Paul Kalanithi died in March 2015, while focusing on this reserve, yet his terms go on as helpful information and something special to us all. “I begun to realize that coming face to face with my own mortality, in a way, had changed nothing and everything,” he composed. “Seven terms from Samuel Beckett begun to repeat in my own head: ‘I can’t go on. I’ll go on.’” When Breathing Becomes Air can be an memorable, life-affirming reflection on the task of facing death and in the relationship between doctor and patient, from a brilliant writer who became both.