Where My Heart Used to Beat - Hardcover

Faulks, Sebastian

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0385678991 ISBN 13: 9780385678995

Publisher: Bond Street Books, 2015

Synopsis

The new bestseller from the author of Birdsong and A Week in December. 

     "You don't live the life I have without making some enemies."
Having accepted a strange but intriguing invitation to a French island, psychiatrist Robert Hendricks meets the man who has commissioned him to write a biography. But his subject seems more interested in finding out about Robert's past than he does in revealing his own. For years, Robert has refused to discuss his past. After the war ended, he refused to go to reunions, believing in some way that denying the killing and the deaths of his friends and fellow soldiers would mean he wouldn't be defined by the experience. Suddenly, he can't keep the memories from overtaking him. But can he trust his memories and can we believe what other people tell us about theirs?
Moving between the present and past, between France and Italy, New York and London, this is a powerful story about love and war, memory and desire, the relationship between the body and the mind.
Compelling and full of suspense, Where My Heart Used to Beat is a tender, brutal and thoughtful portrait of a man and a century, which asks whether, given the carnage we've witnessed and inflicted over the past one hundred years, people can ever be the same.

About this title

About the Author

SEBASTIAN FAULKS's books include Birdsong, A Possible Life, Human Traces, On Green Dolphin Street, Charlotte Gray, The Fatal Englishman, The Girl at the Lion d'Or, Engleby, A Week in December and the James Bond novel Devil May Care. In 2011 he wrote and presented the four-part television series Faulks on Fiction for BBC Two.

Review

A Daily Express Best Book of 2015

"Where My Heart Used to Beat . . . has wonderful strengths, especially Faulks' lucid, philosophical voice, and it's filled with scenes of genuine power." —USA Today

"A profoundly moving novel." —The Independent (UK)

"This is a terrific novel, humming with ideas, knowing asides, shafts of sunlight, shouts of laughter and moments of almost unbearable tragedy." —The Telegraph (UK)

"Faulks' appeal and popularity come from his confident balancing of historically accurate detail with ardent . . . sympathy for passionate private lives." —The New York Times Book Review

"Faulks [is] an unabashed novelist of ideas. . . . Planting clues and dangling red herrings as though he were writing a murder mystery, Faulks expertly crafts a harrowing portrait of . . . a man defined by loss. . . . We hope for at least a measure of happiness for this man of sorrows, because Faulks has drawn us so persuasively and passionately into his struggles." —The Boston Globe

"An absorbing look at the intimate connection between love, war and memory." —Kirkus Reviews, starred review

"Faulks examines the vagaries of human nature when under siege. . . . Faulks is renowned and respected for his fresh approach to . . . combat's assault on the human psyche." —Publishers Weekly

"Faulks is adept at conjuring up compelling narrative. [When My Heart Used to Beat] has a strangely familiar feel that will delight the substantial existing Faulks audience." —Financial Times (UK)

"Where My Heart Used to Beat shows a fine writer at the peak of his imaginative powers." —Sunday Express (UK)

"Sebastian Faulks brilliantly explores the impact of warfare, both during and after the fighting. . . . This new novel is one of his most engaging, intelligent, continuously interesting and well told. His admiring readership won't be disappointed." —The Scotsman (UK)

"Fans of Faulks—and they are legion—will find a great deal to admire and ponder and sorrow at within these pages. Its aspirations are sincere and noble." —The Spectator (UK)

"The passages set in the trenches of Anzio in 1944 are as compelling and alive as anything he has written since Birdsong, his huge-selling 1993 novel about British tunnel-diggers at the Somme. The intricacies of war suit Faulks' love of research and his mastery of it—how to layer and find ornament in it, what German tanks to mention, what level of ignorance to assume on the part of his reader. And there's something about the everyday nearness of men being ripped apart by flying metal that raises Faulks' officer-class prose to its sharpest pitch." —The Guardian (UK)

"[A] compelling and beautifully written novel." —The Sydney Morning Herald (Australia)

About this edition

• Publisher: Bond Street Books
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 0385678991
• ISBN 13: 9780385678995
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 336