Where My Heart Used to Beat

Sebastian Faulks ( Hutchinson, 336pp, £20, Oldie price £16.50) ‘SEBASTIAN FAULKS has been turning war into slickly serious fiction for decades now,' James Kidd reminded readers of the

South China Morning Post. In Where My Heart Used to Beat Faulks addresses its psychological aftermath. Robert Hendricks, a psychiatrist, is ‘determined not to be defined by the years he spent as a young man during the Second World War “in uniform, in foreign countries, killing men I didn't know”, and has shut himself off from his past', according to Alexandra Frean in the Times. Robbie Millen, also in the Times, revealed that Hendricks ‘is asked to become a literary executor to an elderly neuroscientist,neuro Alexander Pereira, who we discoverdisco knows a lot about Hendricks and hish father'.

In the Evening Standard David SextonSe explained how ‘over the coursec of their discussions we l learn both of the horrors of the trenches in the First World W War that killed his father and of Hendricks'sH traumatic experiences in the Second World War. A vivid wa wartime romance with an Italian woman,wom inexplicably suddenly broken off by her,h hasn't helped either.' ‘ Where M My Heart Used to Beat is subtle in its treatment of memory and madness, and compelling as a study of a man floundering in love and war in “a century of psychosis”,' according to Malcolm Forbes in the Australian.

Toby Clements, in the Sunday Telegraph, also applauded ‘this terrific novel, humming with ideas, shouts of laughter and moments of almost unbearable tragedy'.

But Cressida Connolly in the Spectator was disappointed: ‘I was never able to form a convincing picture of the narrator, less still of his enigmatic lover, while the older physician was almost absurdly under-realised.' Elias O'hanlon, in the Irish

Independent, was similarly frustrated, finding it ‘a story that often seems to be made up of scraps of other possible narratives. Characters come and go. Things happen, but are not necessarily related to any of the other things that happen.'