Where My Heart Used to Beat
-
-
5.0 • 2 Ratings
-
-
- $13.99
-
- $13.99
Publisher Description
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The subject of war is not new to Faulks, who has explored both world wars in many of his previous works. In his 13th novel, he examines the vagaries of human nature when under siege, primarily through the eyes of Robert Hendricks, who was at the front in WWII and whose father died in WWI. Readers first meet Hendricks in 1980, when he's an accomplished British psychiatrist visiting New York for a convention. Upon his return home, he receives a letter from Alexander Pereira, a neurologist in France, who explains that he served in WWI with Hendricks's father and has a job proposition for Hendricks. The ensuing relationship between the two men serves as a balm to Hendricks. Through discussions both therapeutic and confessional, he reveals the heart of his war experiences, as well as his postwar work, and finds a kind of closure. Hendricks, whose experiences were harrowing on the one hand and joyous on the other he met his one true love in Italy comes to terms with the lonely life he has led since the war. Faulks is renowned and respected for his fresh approach to well-trod topics, such as combat's assault on the human psyche. Here Hendricks posits the decline of humanity in the despicable acts that occur under the guise of war, but still throws himself into trying to repair the mentally and emotionally broken. Despite everything he's experienced, he will not give up on the human race.
