Review: The Tell-Tale Heart by Jill Dawson

After years of excessive drink and sex, Patrick has suffered a massive heart attack. Although he's only fifty, he's got just 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.

ebook, 256 pages

Expected publication: February 10th 2015 by Harper Perennial
Genre: Fiction

Kristine's Thoughts:

I received an advanced readers copy from Harper Perennial via Edelweiss in exchange for an honest review. Thank you!

I have to be honest as much as I hate it. I tried, I really tried to like this book. Page after page I searched for something to hang on to. Something that would peak my interest and give me something positive to discuss. I just couldn't find it. The characters weren't likeable and the plot was dull and all over the map. In fact, I found it difficult and painful to get through. 256 pages is a short book in my opinion and it took me over a week to finish it. It just wasn't for me but I do encourage others to form their own opinions. Maybe I was just having a bad week??

About the Author

Jill Dawson is the author of Trick of the Light, Magpie, Fred and Edie, which was shortlisted for the Whitbread Novel Award and the Orange Prize; Wild Boy, Watch Me Disappear, which was longlisted for the Orange Prize; The Great Lover, and Lucky Bunny. She has edited six anthologies of short stories and poetry and has written for numerous U.K. publications, including the Guardian, the Times, Vogue, and Harper’s Bazaar. She lives in Norfolk with her husband and two sons.

Connect with Jill

Website/Twitter/Facebook/Goodreads