Heartbreak

Description

In Heartbreak, Craig Raine's startlingly 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 actress, 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 to 1991. He is now a Fellow in English at New College, Oxford, and has been the editor of Arete, the arts tri-quarterly, since 1999. He is the author of six works of poetry, and his Collected Poems 1978-1999 were published in 2000. His verse drama, '1953' was directed by Patrick Marber at the Almeida Theatre in 1996. He is the author of two collections of literary essays and, most recently, a critical study T S Eliot (2007). Heartbreak is his first novel.

"By turns erudite, irreverent, playful." "--Guardian" "Craig Raine is incapable of a dull thought." --Ian McEwan "Tender, ludic and intelligent. . . . The poet Craig Raine is also now the novelist Craig Raine. A magnificent, enigmatic coda rounds off "Heartbreak" in the prose-poetry of both." --"Literary Review"