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Just before dawn on a Sunday morning, three teenage boys go surfing. Returning home, exhausted, the driver lets the car drift off the road into a tree. Two of the boys are wearing seat belts; one is sent through the windshield. He is declared brain-dead shortly after arriving at the hospital. His heart is still beating.
The Heart takes place over the twenty-four hours surrounding a fatal accident and a resulting heart transplant as life is taken from a young man and given to a woman close to death. In gorgeous, ruminative prose it examines the deepest feelings of everyone involved - grieving parents, hardworking doctors and nurses - as they navigate decisions of life and death. As stylistically audacious as it is emotionally explosive, Maylis de Kerangal's The Heart has mesmerized readers in France, where it has been hailed as the breakthrough work of a new literary star.
"Starred Review. [De Kerangal's] writing is uncommonly beautiful and never lacking humanity. The poetic interrogation of our contemporary medical reality affords a view only literature can provide." - Publisher's Weekly
"Starred Review. Kerangal infuses each beautifully rendered element with multiple dimensions of meaning and emotion to create a sensuous and propulsive novel of tragedy and hope." - Booklist
"I read The Heart in a single sitting. It is a gripping, deceptively simple tale - a death, a life resurrected - in which you follow along as everyone touched by the events is made to reveal what matters most to them in their lives. I was completely absorbed." - Atul Gawande, author of Being Mortal
"If function dictates form, Maylis de Kerangal's The Heart is a perfect novel - its writing as measured and precise as a scalpel in the hands of a gifted surgeon. The pure beauty of these short, sharp cuts has produced a devastating and brilliant work." - Anita Shreve, author of Stella Bain
"[The Heart] is a splendid title and a splendid book ... Before this fifth novel, [de Kerangal] was considered one of the most promising French novelists. [The Heart] is more than a promise; in France it was an immediate bestseller, and has remained so from the beginning to the end of 2014 and reconciled the most demanding literary critics with the largest audience." - Emmanuel Carrere, author of Limonov, Publisher Weekly's Top Authors Pick Their Favorite Books of 2014
This information about The Heart was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Photo Credit: (c) Emmanuelle Marchadour
Maylis de Kerangal is the award winning and critically acclaimed author of several books, including Naissance d'un pont (Birth of a Bridge), winner of the Prix Franz Hessel and Prix Médicis; Réparer les vivants, which won the Grand Prix RTL-Lire and whose English translation, The Heart, was one of the Wall Street Journal's Ten Best Fiction Works of 2016 and the winner of the 2017 Wellcome Book Prize; and Un chemin de tables, whose English translation, The Cook, was a New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice. Mend the Living was Longlisted for the Booker International Prize 2016.
Name Pronunciation
Maylis de Kerangal: my-LEECE dee CARE-en-gal (second part of the first name rhymes with "fleece")
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