Andrea Barrett did not start out to be a fiction writer; she wanted to be a scientist. “I really wanted to be Darwin in a skirt wandering through the Galapagos or the Amazon naming birds and trees,” she says. Instead, Barrett has translated her fascination with science and the natural world into award-winning novels and short stories. Barrett is especially drawn to the history of exploration and the suffering men and women were willing to endure in the pursuit of knowledge. The “Voyage of the Narwhal” (1998) tells of a harrowing expedition to the Arctic, while in the title story from “Ship Fever,” a doctor struggles through a typhus epidemic.

Born in 1954, Andrea Barrett grew up on Cape Cod and studied biology at Union College in Schenectady. She now lives with her husband in western Massachusetts, where she teaches at Williams College. She has published six novels and two story collections, “Ship Fever,” for which she won the 1996 National Book Award for fiction, and “Servants of the Map” (2002), a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Her awards include fellowships from MacArthur Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Biographical info compiled from the following sources: Seattle Arts & Lectures, Reading Group Guides, Library of Congress.

Also by Andrea Barrett

• Lucid Stars, 1988
• Secret Harmonies, 1990
• The Middle Kingdom, 1992
• The Forms of Water, 1994
• Ship Fever, 1996
• The Voyage of the Narwhal, 1998
• Servants of the Map, 2002
• The Air We Breathe, 2007

About the Book

Barrett”s 2007 work, “The Air We Breathe,” is her sixth novel. In it, she weaves a tale of tuberculosis patients and passion against the backdrop of World War I. The novel was partly inspired by the research Barrett did for her story “The Cure” in “Servants of the Map.” “While I was researching that story, I got really curious about the big public sanitariums where people who didn”t have any money or families got sent,” Barrett told Sarah Seltzer in a Publishers Weekly interview.

Set in the Adirondacks of upstate New York in 1916, the novel is told in the first person plural and features four main protagonists: wealthy cement-plant owner Miles Fairchild, who is staying at a private guesthouse away from the sanitarium; Leo Marburg, a Polish-German immigrant at the sanitarium; young Naomi, who is Miles”s driver; and the ­­­­ward nurse and friend of Naomi’s, Eudora. While Miles takes a fancy for Eudora Naomi, she does not return the affection, but is in love with Leo. However, Leo in turn has a secret yearning for Eudora. This tangled love quartet ultimately leads to tragedy when Miles becomes a super-patriot as the U.S. prepares to enter the war, and foreigners of all stripes come under scrutiny.

- Contemporary Authors Online, 2009, Cengage Learning

Related Links

• GoodReads
• LibraryThing
• Shelfari
• Amazon.com
• Barnes & Noble
• Powell’s Books
• New York Times Book Review
• Hear the author read excerpts at NPR Books

Interviews

• Columbia Daily Tribune
• Interview with Andrea Barrett

Publisher’s Pages

• Andrea Barrett
• Reading Group Guide

Download MP3 Podcast

“I’m particularly delighted to have ‘The Air We Breathe’ chosen for Columbia’s One Read program, as the idea of small groups gathering to discuss subjects of common interest is central to the novel itself. When I was inventing the discussion group at the center of the novel, I was thinking about both the workmen’s reading circles and study groups so popular at the time, and also my own experience of writers’ groups, which were central to my education (and which often met in libraries—hooray for libraries!) People confined to public sanatoria in the early part of the 20th century were commonly lumped together–as immigrants, as the indigent, as patients carrying a dreaded contagious disease—into someone else’s convenient categories. One way for them to maintain their individuality was for them to gather as a group defined by their own interests and their own stories, rather than by the preconceptions of outsiders.

The link to the reading groups popular in our time isn’t coincidental; I cherish these and think they’re an immensely valuable way to share our interests and passions for literature and for life.”

Best wishes,
Andrea

• Books & Authors Database
• GoodReads: Barrett | Lahiri
• LibraryThing: Barrett | Lahiri
• Shelfari: Barrett | Lahiri
• Amazon.com: Barrett | Lahiri
• Barnes & Noble: Barrett | Lahiri
• Powell’s Books: Barrett | Lahiri
• New York Times Book Reviews: Barrett | Lahiri 1, Lahiri 2
• Hear the authors read excerpts at NPR Books Barrett | Lahiri

Interviews

• Interview with Andrea Barrett
• Interview with Jhumpa Lahiri

Publisher’s Pages

• The Air We Breathe
• Unaccustomed Earth
• Jhumpa Lahiri’s Official Web Site

Vote at: oneread.dbrl.org