Where My Heart Used to Beat

Description

On a small island off the south coast of France, Robert Hendricks, an English doctor who has seen the best and the worst the twentieth century had to offer, is forced to confront the events that made up his life. His host, and antagonist, is Alexander Pereira, a man whose time is running out, but who seems to know more about his guest than Hendricks himself does. The search for sanity takes us through the war in Italy in 1944, a passionate love that seems to hold out hope, the great days of idealistic work in the 1960s and finally - unforgettably - back into the trenches of the Western Front. The recurring themes of Sebastian Faulks's fiction are brought together with a new stylistic brilliance as the novel casts a long, baleful light over the century we have left behind but may never fully understand. Daring, ambitious and in the end profoundly moving, this is Faulks's most remarkable book yet.

Sebastian Faulks was born in April 1953. Before becoming a full-time writer in 1991, he worked as a journalist. Sebastian Faulks's books include A Possible Life, Human Traces, On Green Dolphin Street, Engleby, Birdsong, A Week in December and Where My Heart Used to Beat.

"A masterpiece...a terrific novel, humming with ideas, knowing asides, shafts of sunlight, shouts of laughter and moments of almost unbearable tragedy" -- Toby Clements * Sunday Telegraph * "Compelling...profoundly moving" -- Leyla Sanai * The Independent on Sunday * "A pleasure from start to finish...WHERE MY HEART USED TO BEAT is that rare book, a page-turning read that also has a significant intellectual and emotional charge." -- Alexander Larman * Sunday Express * "There is everything here: love, loss, death, war, history, memory, ideas, travel, friendship, rivalry, chance - and sex. It comes in an immaculately crafted package that continues an ingenious dual-timeline with plot twists that serve the reader with the exact impression of what it might be to live the life of the novel's gimlet-eyed and engaging narrator, Dr Robert Hendricks" * Sunday Telegraph * "Combining as it does the cultural narrative of a complex century forsaken by God and certainty, a serious investigation into the vulnerability of the human mind and an old-fashioned - in the best sense - story of love and war, this is an ambitious, demanding and profoundly melancholy book" * Guardian * "a powerful and moving novel" * Daily Express * "This is not a wartime tragic romance, or a simple story of trauma. It is much more affecting than that." -- Rosemary Goring * Herald * "An intelligent and moving examination of the traumas of war. Faulks is as accomplished as ever" * Scotsman, Books of the Year * "It's a melancholy tale of war, love and loss that will leave you gulping back sobs" * Observer, Books 2015 in Review * "Faulks gets better and better with every book. This is surely one of the year's best novels." -- John Harding * Daily Mail *