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Where My Heart Used to Beat: A Novel Kindle Edition
A sweeping drama about the madness of war and the power of love that marks acclaimed novelist Sebastian Faulks's return, after twenty years, to the fictional territory of his #1 international bestseller Birdsong
London, 1980. Robert Hendricks, an established psychiatrist and author, has so bottled up memories of his own wartime past that he is nearly sunk into a life of aloneness and depression. Out of the blue, a baffling letter arrives from one Dr. Alexander Pereira, a neurologist and a World War I veteran who claims to be an admirer of Robert's published work. The letter brings Robert to the older man's home on a rocky, secluded island off the south of France, and into tempests of memories--his childhood as a fatherless English boy, the carnage he witnessed and the wound he can't remember receiving as a young officer in World War II, and, above all, the great, devastating love of his life, an Italian woman, "L," whom he met during the war. As Robert's recollections pour forth, he's unsure whether they will lead to psychosis--or redemption. But Dr. Pereira knows. Profoundly affecting and masterfully told, Where My Heart Used to Beat sweeps through the 20th century, brilliantly interrogating the darkest corners of the human mind and bearing tender witness to the abiding strength of love.
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherHenry Holt and Co.
- Publication dateJanuary 26, 2016
- File size1571 KB
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Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Review
"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 the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Where My Heart Used to Beat
A Novel
By Sebastian FaulksHenry Holt and Company
Copyright © 2016 Sebastian FaulksAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8050-9732-0
CHAPTER 1
With its free peanuts and anonymity, the airline lounge is somewhere I can usually feel at home; but on this occasion I was in too much of a panic to enjoy its self-importance. It had been hard work getting there. The queues at Kennedy were backed up to the terminal doors; the migrants heaving trunks onto the check-in scales made New York look like Lagos.
I had done a bad thing and wanted to escape the city. Staying in an Upper West Side apartment belonging to my friend Jonas Hoffman, I had ordered in a call girl. I got the number from a phone booth on Columbus. It seemed to me important to get the sex act into perspective, to laugh at myself in the way you laugh at other people for their choice of mates. A true view of myself and my concerns: that was what I needed.
I suppose I'd say I was a voluptuary, someone who had seen it all, yet when the super called to say there was a young lady on her way up, it struck me that I was nervous. The front door buzzed. I took a pull of iced gin and went to open it. It was eleven in the morning. She wore an overcoat of olive green and carried a serviceable handbag with a clasp; for a moment I thought there was a mistake and that she must be Hoffman's cleaner. Only the high heels and lipstick suggested something more frolicsome. I offered her a drink.
"No, thanks, mister. Maybe a glass of water."
In so far as I'd imagined what she might be like, I'd pictured a pinup — or a tart with platinum hair and rouge. But this woman was of indeterminate nationality, possibly Puerto Rican. She was not ugly in any way, yet neither was she beautiful. She looked like someone's thirty-eight-year-old sister; like the person who might be in charge of the Laundromat or work behind the desk of a Midtown travel agent.
I brought back the water and sat beside her in Hoffman's huge, book-lined living room. She had taken off her coat and was wearing an incongruous cocktail dress. It was hard not to think of her family: brother, parents ... children. I put my hand on her knee and felt the coarse nylon. Was I meant to kiss her? It seemed too intimate; we'd only just met. ... But I tried anyway and found a world of fatigue in her response.
It brought a flash-recall of Paula Wood, a sixteen-year-old girl I'd kissed in a village hall a lifetime ago, before I'd discovered the awfulness of desire. Kissing this hooker was like kissing a mannequin: it was like a repetition, or a memory, not like a kiss at all. I went to the kitchen and poured another half tumbler of gin with ice cubes and two slices of lemon.
"Come this way," I said, gesturing down the corridor to the spare room — my room — at the end. Hoffman kept it for his mother, for when she visited from Chicago, and I felt a moment of unease as we went in. I pushed off my shoes and lay on the bed.
"You'd better take off your clothes."
"You better pay me first."
I pulled out some money and handed it over. With what looked like some reluctance, she undressed. When she was naked, she came and stood beside me. She took my hand and ran it up over her abdomen and breasts. The belly was rounded, and there were small fat deposits above the hips; the lumpy navel had been botched by the obstetrician. Her skin was smooth, and there was a look of concentration in her eyes — not kindness or concern, more a sort of junior-employee focus. I felt extremely tired and wanted to close my eyes. At the same time I felt an obligation to this woman; it seemed we were joine
Product details
- ASIN : B00ZOOFYSK
- Publisher : Henry Holt and Co. (January 26, 2016)
- Publication date : January 26, 2016
- Language : English
- File size : 1571 KB
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
- Screen Reader : Supported
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Enabled
- Word Wise : Enabled
- Sticky notes : On Kindle Scribe
- Print length : 350 pages
- Best Sellers Rank: #150,064 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #201 in British & Irish Literary Fiction
- #1,036 in Historical Literary Fiction
- #1,111 in Contemporary Literary Fiction
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The lead character chooses physiology as a profession, an emerging new field with little known in the 50s. But this is more a frame around his own journey and damage, and despite being an expert in the field of mental health, he has his own issues with fixing.
Robert can’t escape his own memories of lifetime traumas, the impact of the father he never knew, his own memories of sexual desires and much more. As we read the novel we are constantly confronted with stories of love and war, of deep friendships and dramatic loss, of the impact of all of this on our bodies and our minds.
Slowly, the story unfolds as Robert relates his story to a fellow psychiatrist who invites him to his island home, off the coast of France. We move between the present and the past, through WWII Tunisa, Italy and London, learn of Robert’s deep love for one woman and reflect on lives torn apart by the destructive forces of the 20th Century.
Robert’s gradual discovery of his father’s story informs his life. We are left thinking about whether any of us can ever be the same after the impacts, directly and indirectly, that war has upon every human being. This novel is one I shall be thinking about for some time.