One of Bill Gates' "Five Best Summer Reads"
The basis for the critically-acclaimed film, Heal the Living,
directed by Katell Quillévéré and starring Tahar Rahim and
Emmanuelle Seigner
Albertine Prize Finalist
Winner of the Wellcome Book Prize and the French-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 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.
