One day, the boys ride their bikes to the ocean – a place Pikelet had been forbidden to go by his father – and watch the surfers. Bonded by their similar appetites for danger, the boys become fast friends. After being challenged to a dare, Pikelet shows that he can hold his breath for a long time, too. His favorite game is to hold his breath underwater to trick people into thinking he has drowned. When Pikelet is eleven, he meets twelve-year-old Ivan “Loonie” Loon, who also loves the water – although not as much as he loves adrenaline. The one talent Pikelet has is the ability to swim well.

The child of elderly, conservative parents, Pikelet, as he was known then, always felt estranged from other kids his age. Afterward, he seeks solace in playing his didjeridoo (a traditional Australian instrument), recalling his childhood in Sawyer. He has a dream about saving himself from drowning. Called to the home of a boy who has apparently died of suicide, the event triggers something in Bruce. His lifelong penchant for thrill-seeking – which he details over the course of the ensuing story – has been channeled into his career. When we meet Bruce Pike at the beginning of Breath, he is in his fifties, a paramedic, and divorced. There, protagonist Bruce “Pikelet” Pike comes of age especially important to this process is his complicated friendship with “Loonie,” and later an older couple that he meets through his adventures with Loonie. Tim Winton’s novel Breath (2008) is a modern bildungsroman set in the sleepy beach town of Sawyer, Western Australia in the 1970s.

Breath by Tim Winton