Where My Heart Used to Beat
- Author Sebastian Faulks
- Narrator David Sibley
- Publisher Random House
- Run Time 11 hours and 5 minutes
- Format Audio
- Genre Historical fiction, Modern and contemporary fiction, Narrative theme: Interior life.
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What to expect
Brought to you by Penguin.
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 2015 (P) Penguin Audio 2015
Critics Review
A masterpiece…a terrific novel, humming with ideas, knowing asides, shafts of sunlight, shouts of laughter and moments of almost unbearable tragedy
Compelling…profoundly moving
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.
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
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
a powerful and moving novel
This is not a wartime tragic romance, or a simple story of trauma. It is much more affecting than that.
An intelligent and moving examination of the traumas of war. Faulks is as accomplished as ever
It’s a melancholy tale of war, love and loss that will leave you gulping back sobs
Faulks gets better and better with every book. This is surely one of the year’s best novels.
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