The Water-Breather - Tapa dura

‘A remarkable portrait of a family under pressure, rather like a photograph album: crammed with rich and vivid detail. The Water-breather teems with delightful incident and a number of enjoyable minor characters... An assured and moving debut.’ Gerard Woodward, Guardian

‘Faccini’s clean style and lack of mawkishness make for a convincing portrayal of the workings of a child’s mind and a truthful and affecting read.’ John Harding, Daily Mail

'Like Esther Freud, he has the rare gift of creating a world we can all relate to from a child's perspective; he depicts minutely observed detail in a larger landscape, both emotional and physical, and in doing so has written a book with an exotic atmosphere which lingers long after one has read the final page.' Rafaella Barker

‘A strange expedition into the border zone between love and anguish, a brilliant and poetic intermingling of memories and dreams.’
Lisa St Aubin de Teran

‘Totally original and mesmerising...Faccini is a brilliant writer and not a sentence in this wonderful book sems out of place.’
Scarlett Thomas, Literary Review

‘To write through the eyes of an eight-year-old boy is one thing. To capture the thoughts and fears of a chid this age is quite another. This accomplished debut from Ben Faccini expresses them beautifully.’
James Simpson, Oxford Times

‘Dark but surprisingly gentle, often unexpectedly comic...with skilled metaphorical layering and acute momentary precision.’
Ali Smith, TLS

‘In this startingly assured debut, Ben Faccini captures the confusion of loss from a child’s perspective and creates a story that is both
life-affirming and funny.’
The Irish News

A song of heat, grief and a sensitive boy’s obsession with undoing the damage done

‘I'm coming up to my ninth birthday. It's the spring of 1978. Our kilometre dial has clocked into thousands and started its cycle over and over again... Our car must keep going, always.'

This is Jean-Pio's boyhood, traversing Europe, from Italy to France to Germany to England as his scientist father attends medical conference after medical conference. Stuck in the back seat of the family Volvo, sandwiched between his two brothers, his mother growing increasingly frenetic and agitated in the front, Jean-Pio thinks he can make everything all right; if he concentrates hard enough they won't crash and if he keeps track of when the petrol light will come on, they won't be abandoned miles from anywhere without gas.

But nothing seems to make sense. And Jean-Pio can't seem to control all the events around him. He can't, for example, save the lives of the thousands of tadpoles he sees dying out of water. And he couldn't save the life of his grandfather, Grand-Maurice, who drowned two years ago.

And it is to his house that they turn, exhausted from a life of constantly travelling, to revive the family home from the ravages of nature and to try to revive their desperately grieving Grandmother with it. In that house and neighbourhood, both heavy with tragedy, Jean-Pio tries to bear the burden of his sadness alone and comes to learn things about his grandfather's death that he just cannot comprehend.

In this startlingly assured debut, Ben Faccini captures the agonies of a painfully sensitive young boy as he tries to minimize the terror he sees looming all around him. Amid the suffocating heat of the Umbrian and southern French countryside, we are presented with a family's grief for a happiness that they cannot restore, and of one boy's obsession with trying.