The Heart: A Novel

The Heart: A Novel

<p><b>One of Bill Gates' "Five Best Summer Reads"</b></p><p><b>The basis for the critically-acclaimed film, <i>Heal the Living</i>, directed by </b><b>Katell </b><b>Quillévéré and starring Tahar Rahim and Emmanuelle Seigner</b></p><p><b>Albertine Prize Finalist</b></p><p><b>Winner of the </b><b>Wellcome Book Prize and the </b><b>French-American Foundation Translation Prize</b></p><p>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.</p><p><i>The Heart </i>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.</p><p>As stylistically audacious as it is emotionally explosive,<i> The Heart </i>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.</p>