Heartbreak

Description

In Heartbreak, Craig Raine's startingly moving, intellectually nimble, sexually candid, wickedly funny first novel, the central character is not a person, but an invisible metaphor: heartbreak. Through the stories of a virtuoso cast of characters - among them a physically scarred academic, a strangely beautiful young girl with Down's syndrome, a world-renowned acttress and a brilliant Czech poet - Heartbreak investigates one of the most elusive yet deeply felt of human conditions. It is a compassionate and textured novel about what happens to us when love and loss collide.

Craig Raine was born in 1944 and educated at Exeter College, Oxford. He became editor of Quarto in 1979 and was subsequently poetry editor at Faber from 1981-1991. He is now a Fellow in English at New College, Oxford. He is the author of two collections of literary essays, and, most recently, a critical study of T.S. Eliot. Heartbreak is his first novel.