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The Heart

  • Book
  • Jan 2, 2014
  • #Fiction
Maylis de Kerangal
@MaylisdeKerangal
(Author)
www.amazon.com
Hardcover
4.3/5 335 ratings
Hardcover Kindle Audiobook Audio cd
See on Goodreads
3.86/5 2.7k ratings
1 Recommender
1 Mention
1 Collection
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... Show More

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.

(From Goodreads)

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Number of Pages: 242

ISBN: 0374240906

ISBN-13: 9780374240905

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Bill Gates @BillGates · May 22, 2017
  • Curated in 5 good summer reads (2017)
While you’ll find this book in the fiction section at your local bookstore, what de Kerangal has done here in this exploration of grief is closer to poetry than anything else. At its most basic level, she tells the story of a heart transplant: a young man is killed in an accident, and his parents decide to donate his heart. But the plot is secondary to the strength of its words and characters. The book uses beautiful language to connect you deeply with people who may be in the story for only a few minutes. For example, de Kerangal goes on for pages about the girlfriend of the surgeon who does the transplant even though you never meet that character. I’m glad Melinda recommended this book to me, and I recently passed it along to a friend who, like me, sticks mostly with nonfiction.
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