Shadows Hold Their Breath

Shadows Hold Their Breath takes place with the backdrop of the 1970s feminist movement and in the final years of the Vietnam War. It tells the story of Kat Hunter, a woman who decides that the only way she can understand her unresolved grief and discover who she is meant to be is to do the unthinkable-the unforgivable. In October 1979, six years after suffering the loss of Beth, her dear friend and sister-in-law, to enemy mortar fire near the village of Qu?ng Ngãi, Vietnam, Kat begins to question everything about her traditional life. In the middle of the night, she slips away from her home in Lexington, Kentucky, her husband, and her three young daughters and boards a Greyhound bus with no specific destination in mind. On the bus, she meets Molly, a young woman who reminds her of Beth. With nowhere else to go, Kat follows Molly and Molly's boyfriend, Jake, to Gatlinburg, Tennessee. Once there, Kat guards the secret that she is married and has abandoned her children to the care of her husband. Kat's journey of self-discovery ultimately leads her down an unexpected path-but what is she willing to sacrifice for that journey?"Like [Henrik] Ibsen's A Doll's House and [Kate] Chopin's The Awakening, Shadows Hold Their Breath explores one woman's decision to leave her husband and children rather than crumble under the weight of patriarchal roles. Kat is also burdened by grief and an unspoken love that perhaps even in her nascent self-awareness is still taboo. The novel offers no easy answers, no pure absolution, just Kat's honest quest to accept-and live-her truth," according to Marie Manilla, author of The Patron Saint of Ugly (Mariner Books, 2014; winner of the 2014 Weatherford Award).