The Heart, Maylis de Kerangal
The Heart, Maylis de Kerangal
List: $19.95 | Sale: $13.97
Club: $9.97

The Heart

Author: Maylis de Kerangal, Sam Taylor

Narrator: Steven Jay Cohen

Unabridged: 8 hr 49 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 12/03/2019

Synopsis

Just before dawn on a Sunday morning, three teenage boys go surfing. While driving home exhausted, the boys are involved in a fatal car accident on a deserted road. Two of the boys are wearing seat belts; one goes through the windshield. The doctors declare him brain-dead shortly after arriving at the hospital, but his heart is still beating.The Heart takes place over the twenty-four hours surrounding the 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 as they navigate decisions of life and death.As stylistically audacious as it is emotionally explosive, The Heart mesmerized readers in France, where it has been hailed as the breakthrough work of a new literary star. With the precision of a surgeon and the language of a poet, de Kerangal has made a major contribution to both medicine and literature with an epic tale of grief, hope, and survival.

About Maylis de Kerangal

Maylis de Kerangal is the author of several novels in French, including Je marche sous un ciel de traîne, La vie voyageuse, Corniche Kennedy, and Naissance d’un pont (published in English as Birth of a Bridge and winner of the Prix Franz Hessel and the Prix Médicis in 2010). She has also published a collection of short stories, Ni fleurs ni couronnes, and a novella, Tangente vers l’est. In 2014, her novel Réparer les vivants (The Heart) won the Grand Prix RTL-Lire and the Student Choice Novel of the Year from France Culture and Télérama. She lives in Paris.

About Sam Taylor

Sam Taylor has written for The Guardian, the Financial Times, Vogue, and Esquire, and has translated such works as the award-winning HHhH, by Laurent Binet, and the internationally bestselling The Truth about the Harry Quebert Affair, by Joel Dicker.

About Steven Jay Cohen

Steven Jay Cohen has been telling stories his whole life, and has worked professionally as a storyteller since 1991. A classically trained actor, he has worked both on stage and behind the microphone for most of his career. Born and raised in Brooklyn, Steven now resides in scenic western Massachusetts, where he lives with his wife, kids, and too many pets to mention.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Ilse

Reports from the heart Mend the Living is a gripping novel of stunning beauty, an audacious and highly original composition on the fragility of life. One man's death is another man's breath. As to the donation and transplantation of vital organs, this proverb, when interpreted literally, is a lap......more

Goodreads review by Jola

Is it possible to fall in love with a book? Probably yes, as it has just happened to me. The symptoms are typical: I keep thinking about it almost all the time. I can't sleep. I can't eat. I can't concentrate. Fortunately, I'm having summer holidays at the moment, otherwise it would be really hard. I......more

Goodreads review by Jen

'Maybe there is a scrapyard for organs somewhere, she thinks, removing her jewellery and her watch, some sort of garbage heap where hers will be dumped along with others, evacuated from the hospital through a back door in large trash bags; she imagines a container for organic matter where it will be......more

Quotes

“From its first, hurtling, paragraph-long sentence, this novel vividly dramatizes each step in the organ-donation process.” New Yorker

“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

“Stunningly well written, ravishingly translated.” Lionel Shriver, author of We Need to Talk about Kevin

“The Heart is the best medical novel I’ve read in years. A deep and gripping meditation on the nature of grief. I was mesmerized.” Sandeep Jauhar, author of Doctored

“This novel is an exploration not only of death but of life, of humanity and fragility, ‘because the heart is more than the heart.’“ New York Times Book Review

“An exquisite valentine to that engine on which every breath depends…Transcendent.” More magazine

“This unlike-anything-you’ve-ever-read novel…shimmers and sears at the same time.” Elle

“Shows that narratives around illness and pain can energize the nobler angels of our nature and make for profoundly lovely art.” The Guardian (London)

“The writing in The Heart has a hurtling, onrushing quality… Sam Taylor[‘s] translation throbs with beauty, sorrow, and an undimmed astonishment at the life of the body.” Wall Street Journal

“[De Kerangal’s] writing is uncommonly beautiful and never lacking humanity.” Publishers Weekly (starred review)

Awards

  • Wellcome Trust Book Prize
  • French-American Foundation Translation Prize
  • Bill Gates Pick
  • Albertine Prize
Add to Cart
Add to Wish List