Originally published in 1950, William Goyen's first novel is an elegy to childhood, memory, loss and love, celebrating boyhood in a small town in Texas.
The book is written as an ethereal address to the people and places the narrator remembers from his childhood in a small Texas town called Charity. More than a story, The House of Breath is a meditation on the nature of identity and origins, memory, and time's annihilation of life.