The Heart: A Novel [Paperback]

One of Bill Gates' Five Best Summer Reads

The basis for the critically-acclaimed film,Heal the Living, directed byKatellQuill?v?r? and starring Tahar Rahim and Emmanuelle Seigner

Albertine Prize Finalist

Winner of theWellcome Book Prize and theFrench-American Foundation Translation Prize

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 Hearttakes 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 Heartmesmerized 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.

[The Heart] is an unusual and often-ravishing novel . . . Ms. de Kerangals long, rolling sentences pulse along in systolic thumps, each beat punctuated by a comma; theyre packed with emotional intensity and florid imagery, and theyve been superbly translated by Sam Taylor. Jennifer Senior,The New York Times

From its first, hurtling, paragraph-long sentence, this novel vividly dramatizes each step in the organ-donation process . . . Its the kind of science writing thats too uncommon, inspiring wonder not by insisting on it but by chronicling every detail. lcr