Narratively ingenious, delicately written, intriguingly plotted, it is literature of the highest quality. He rescues and resuscitates the unconscious man, then quietly leaves when the emergency services take over. The quality of the writing and storytelling, plus the book’s commendable brevity made this a rather gripping read for me, but in the end I wasn’t sure whether it had said anything really new. Now, this may have been a side effect of the drugs, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that I’d only just arrived in the world, as a replacement for the old me.

Our unnamed narrator is a vehicle for the fascinating story of Jeff Cook, an old acquaintance he meets in the airport while waiting for a flight.He goes into great detail about the man he saves being a famous art dealer who eventually takes Jeff under his wing. His work has appeared in The Paris Review, StoryQuarterly, Best New American Voices, and the Los Angeles Times, among other publications, and he is a contributing editor of A Public Space. Parts of it were interesting and hearing about how Jeff had saved the drowning man was quite an engaging bit of writing, but beyond that I got a little lost.

It is accepted by you that Daunt Books has no control over additional charges in relation to customs clearance. After some small talk, Cook invites the man to wait out the delay with him in the first-class lounge. Marooned at JFK in between flights from Los Angeles to Frankfurt, our nameless narrator hears a name over the loudspeaker. But Jeff can’t let go of the events of that traumatic day and he begins to feel compelled to learn more about the man whose life he has saved.Jeff had to know more about the man he saved and one day, finds himself visiting the man’s art gallery. I confess to being a little disappointed by the ending; I think I was expecting something much more startling.

I was thinking about how a sight that might consume our attention completely on the ground could, from another perspective, barely register as a blip on an enormous field, when I heard a name over the PA. I’d said it before and meant it every time, but people always took it as an expression of false modesty. Well, Jeff is so successful that he has access to the first-class lounge and invites the narrator to wait out the flight with him in the luxury of first-class. Mouth To Mouth is good, it makes some interesting observations and it’s certainly worth reading, but I’m not sure it’s quite as brilliant or profound as it’s made out to be.Both are flying to Berlin and when their flight is delayed they sit in the first-class lounge and get caught up. But after stewing in his own juices for a while his curiosity gets the better of him – he needs to know more. In the great tradition of morally murky narrators such as those in Gone Girl , The White Tiger or The Talented Mr Ripley , comes a compelling, one-sitting literary thriller of imposters and Faustian bargains, in which a man pulls another man from the rough surf. The central question being asked, it seems, is whether this was an act of fate, or if, indeed, Jeff was steering his own destiny, but the avenues the author goes down on his exploration of this old question were not particularly interesting to me. The unnamed narrator of this story runs into Jeff Cook, an old classmate whom he hasn't seen in a long time, at the airport.

The book is less than 200 pages with some really short chapters, perfect for "just one more", and I found it absolutely mesmerizing. Jeff reveals that after that traumatic, galvanizing morning on the beach, he was compelled to learn more about the man whose life he had saved, convinced that their fates were now entwined. The book opens with the unnamed narrator at the airport awaiting his flight to Germany for a business meeting. A couple working as chauffeurs have been accused of stealing millions from the founder of Tin House Books.

My thanks to Atlantic Books for providing a copy of this book via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.