Name: Meryn Kae Addison's review of Where My Heart Used to Beat by Sebastian Faulks
Item: Where My Heart Used to Beat
Rating: 3
Author: Meryn Kae Addison

Sebastian Faulks

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.

Where My Heart Used to Beat

Amy Buckle

Meryn Kae Addison

A haunting tale of war, love and loss from the author of Birdsong and A Week in December The Sunday Times bestseller 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 is Alexander Pereira, a man who seems to know more about his guest than Hendricks himself does. The search for the past 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. This moving 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.

Sian Wadey

Sara Holman

Liz Prinz

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.

Amy Buckle &
Where My Heart Used to Beat by Sebastian Faulks

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Amy Buckle &Where My Heart Used to Beat by Sebastian Faulks

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Amy Buckle &
Where My Heart Used to Beat by Sebastian Faulks