Would you give up drinking and sex? Well, I guess if you
had a heart attack and only given months to live, you
probably would.
In THE TELL-TALE HEART, this is Patrick's life. He loved to drink and, of
course, to have sex. But then comes the massive heart attack. The
doctors tell him he only has a few months left unless by
some miracle a transplant becomes available. Due to a
terrible motorcycle accident, Patrick gets his miracle.
While his body is not rejecting the heart, Patrick's mind
can't over come this. He wonders about the young boy
who lost his life. Patrick does everything he can to find
out the name of this boy. He feels if he can find out
about the boy's life, he may be able to over come this feeling he
has.
Jill Dawson's books are a little hard to finish. It took
me quite a while to finish this book. To me there was too
much back and forth between Patrick's old life and what he is
going though now. One minute you are in the hospital room,
and in the next, Patrick is thinking about an old girlfriend. I
keep losing track of who was who.
After reading comments by other people, there
seems to be a lot of people who enjoyed this book.
Unfortunately, I was not one of them. I may go back some
time and try to read this book again. Maybe the second
time, I will enjoy it a bit more.
A man’s life and his capacity for love mysteriously
changes
after a heart transplant in this
dramatic and affecting novel—as provocative and poignant
as
the works of Jodi Picoult, Jojo Moyes,
and Alice Sebold—from the acclaimed Orange Prize nominee
and
author of Lucky Bunny.
After years of excessive drink and sex, Patrick’s heart
has
collapsed. Only fifty, he has been given
six months to live. But a tragic accident involving a
teenager and a motorcycle gives the university
professor a second chance. He receives the boy’s heart in
a
transplant, and by this miracle of
science, two strangers are forever linked.
Though Patrick’s body accepts his new heart, his old life
seems to reject him. Bored by the things
that once enticed him, he begins to look for meaning in
his
experience. Discovering that his donor
was a local boy named Drew Beamish, he becomes intensely
curious about Drew’s life and the
influences that shaped him-from the eighteenth-century
ancestor involved in a labor riot to the
bleak beauty of the Cambridgeshire countryside in which he
was raised. Patrick longs to know the
story of this heart that is now his own.
In this intriguing and deeply absorbing story, Jill Dawson
weaves together the lives and loves of
three vibrant characters connected by fate to explore
questions of life after death, the nature of
the soul, the unseen forces that connect us, and the
symbolic power of the heart.