A heart-wrenching tale of life, death, and the fragile threads that bind us together.
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, Maylis de Kerangal 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.
Winner of the Wellcome Book Prize and the French-American Foundation Translation Prize, and an Albertine Prize Finalist, The Heart formed the basis for the critically-acclaimed film, Heal the Living, directed by Katell Quillévéré and starring Tahar Rahim and Emmanuelle Seigner. The Heart was also named one of Bill Gates' "Five Best Summer Reads".