The Heart

The Heart
ISBN: 9781250117915
Publication Date: 14 February 2017

One of Bill Gates' "Five Best Summer Reads"

The basis for the critically-acclaimed film, Heal the Living, directed byKatellQuillevere 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 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.