Once Upon a River

by Diane Setterfield

They stood on tiptoe to lean forwards, peer over shoulders, squint into the circle of light from the candle that Rita held over the sleeping girl. Their eyes followed her every breath and, without knowing it, their breathing fell in time with hers, as if their many chests might make a great pair of bellows to inflate her little lungs. The room itself expanded and contracted with her respiration.

but he got more and more muddled, putting the end at the beginning and the beginning at the end, and the middle—well, the middle hardly featured at all.

Like this book

Whoever would think a human body could have so much water in it?

It is very like Shakespeare's Lady MacBeth's "Who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?"