An Unofficial Breath is Marie Buchanan's second novel, following the highly successful Greenshards.

Suspended in the limbo of a post operative relapse, she was conscious of an unnatural extension of her faculties. She saw herself moving, floating like an invasive vapor, seeping into angles, curling over new surfaces, dispersing. Through her heightened senses, she was drawn into a further dimension of reality that was haunted by half recognized phantoms, places, phenomena. Time itself ceased to flow forward. Lorna Becket believed she was dead. As though in a telephone conversation when wires are crossed. Lorna received messages from others' minds. And when she recovered, she still had to go where she was directed, seek and speak as some other power demanded. Fulfilling at length a pattern that had begun before her birth and might extend even beyond her own physical death.

“Dead, I am dead," she told herself. Dead, just as it said on the card. (It was nothing terrible now, but a little surprising.) Anyway, I don’t think I mind. Yes, that is what it is; these faces are the living, and I am not. Severed. It is bound to feel strange at first. Absurd that I had almost got away with thinking I still lived, persuaded myself that I was dressing to go home. Perhaps there never was any buff card, just the truth catching up, as in dreams. "So life has stopped. What now?"

An Unofficial Breath is an imaginative novel of perception which will strangely echo the experiences of many who have traveled in the subconscious or dared to probe their own inner space.