Where My Heart Used to Beat

A haunting tale of war, love and loss from the author of Birdsong and A Week in DecemberA haunting tale of war, love and loss from the author of Birdsong and A Week in DecemberThe Sunday Times bestsellerOn a small island off the south coast of France, Robert Hendricks - an English doctor who has seen the best and the worst the twentieth century had to offer - is forced to confront the events that made up his life. His host is Alexander Pereira, a man who seems to know more about his guest than Hendricks himself does.The search for the past takes us through the war in Italy in 1944, a passionate love that seems to hold out hope, the great days of idealistic work in the 1960s and finally - unforgettably - back into the trenches of the Western Front.This moving novel casts a long, baleful light over the century we have left behind but may never fully understand. Daring, ambitious and in the end profoundly moving, this is Faulks's most remarkable book yet.

Long-listed for IMPAC Dublin Literary Award 2016 (UK)

“A masterpiece...a terrific novel, humming with ideas, knowing asides, shafts of sunlight, shouts of laughter and moments of almost unbearable tragedy”

A masterpiece…a terrific novel, humming with ideas, knowing asides, shafts of sunlight, shouts of laughter and moments of almost unbearable tragedy -- Toby Clements Sunday Telegraph
Compelling...profoundly moving -- Leyla Sanai The Independent on Sunday
A pleasure from start to finish…WHERE MY HEART USED TO BEAT is that rare book, a page-turning read that also has a significant intellectual and emotional charge. -- Alexander Larman Sunday Express
There is everything here: love, loss, death, war, history, memory, ideas, travel, friendship, rivalry, chance – and sex. It comes in an immaculately crafted package that continues an ingenious dual-timeline with plot twists that serve the reader with the exact impression of what it might be to live the life of the novel’s gimlet-eyed and engaging narrator, Dr Robert Hendricks Sunday Telegraph
Combining as it does the cultural narrative of a complex century forsaken by God and certainty, a serious investigation into the vulnerability of the human mind and an old-fashioned – in the best sense – story of love and war, this is an ambitious, demanding and profoundly melancholy book Guardian
a powerful and moving novel Daily Express
This is not a wartime tragic romance, or a simple story of trauma. It is much more affecting than that. -- Rosemary Goring Herald
An intelligent and moving examination of the traumas of war. Faulks is as accomplished as ever Scotsman, Books of the Year
It’s a melancholy tale of war, love and loss that will leave you gulping back sobs Observer, Books 2015 in Review
Faulks gets better and better with every book. This is surely one of the year’s best novels. -- John Harding Daily Mail

Sebastian Faulks has written nineteen books, of which A Week in December and The Fatal Englishman were number one in the Sunday Times bestseller lists. He is best known for Birdsong, part of his French trilogy, and Human Traces, the first in an ongoing Austrian trilogy. Before becoming a full-time writer, he worked as a journalist on national papers. He has also written screenplays and has appeared in small roles on stage. He lives in London.

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