The Weight of Air (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9798184068626)

A brilliant, armored trauma surgeon crosses an ocean to fix a broken maternal-health program - and discovers, at forty-one, that the life she never let herself want has been waiting for her all along.

As the trauma chief at a Baltimore hospital, she has built a life on a single certainty: when the doors burst open and the worst thing in the world comes through them, she will be the calm at the center. It has cost her a marriage, a sister held at arm's length, and a loneliness so constant she has stopped feeling it as anything but the weather of being alive. Then a foundation she has never heard of offers her six months in Lisbon, leading a program built not to save women one at a time at the edge of catastrophe, but to catch them long before they fall.

She tells herself it is only a job.

In the gold light of a foreign city, Renata meets Daniel Vasconcelos - a health economist who once practiced medicine too, and walked away from it, and carries the same armor she does, worn the other way around. What begins as a collision over a graph becomes the first thing in two decades she has let herself want. But wanting, she discovers, is the most dangerous thing of all. When the program's funding falters and her old life calls her home, Renata must decide whether she is brave enough to stay in the discomfort of being loved - or whether she will run, one last time, into the safe cold solitude that has never once hurt her.

A sweeping, tender novel about reinvention, the work that saves us, and the love we almost let pass us by, The Weight of Air asks whether a person can change at forty-one - and answers, against every odd, that she can.