Description:
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.
Brief description:
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.
Review Quotes:
"From its first, hurtling, paragraph-long sentence, this novel vividly dramatizes each step in the organ-donation process."
-- "New Yorker"