From James Meek, the award-winning author of the international bestseller The People’s Act of Love, comes a rich and intricate novel about everything that matters to us now: children, celebrity, secrets and shame, the quest for youth, loyalty and betrayal, falls from grace, acts of terror, and the wonderful, terrible inescapability of family.
Ritchie Shepherd, an aging pop star and a producer of a reality show for teen talent, is starting to trip over his own lies. Maybe filming a documentary about his father, Captain Shepherd, a British soldier executed by Northern Irish guerrillas, will redeem him.
His sister, Bec, is getting closer and closer to a vaccine for malaria. When she’s not in Tanzania harvesting field samples, she’s peering through a microscope at her own blood to chart the risky treatment she’s testing on herself. She’s as addicted to honesty as Ritchie is to trickery.
Val Oatman is the editor of a powerful tabloid newspaper. The self-appointed conscience of the nation, scourge of hypocrites and cheats, he believes he will marry beautiful Bec.
Alex Comrie, a gene therapist (and formerly the drummer in Ritchie’s band), is battling his mortally ill uncle, a brilliant and domineering scientist, over whether Alex might actually have discovered a cure for aging. Alex, too, believes he will marry Bec.
Colum O’Donabháin has just been released from prison, having served a twenty-five-year sentence for putting a gun to Captain Shepherd’s head when he refused to give up an informer. He now writes poetry.
Their stories meet and tangle in this bighearted epic that is also shrewd, starkly funny, and utterly of the moment. The Heart Broke In is fiction with the reverberating resonance of truth.
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Praise for The Heart Broke In
“James Meek’s new novel has all the urgent readability of his previous work combined with a wide-ranging vision of social and personal responsibility that’s very rare in current fiction. I suppose we could call it a moral thriller. Whatever we call it, I was enormously impressed.” —Philip Pullman
“There is much to enjoy in this ambitious portrait of deeply human characters, grappling with how to live in the modern world, where science is capable of almost anything.” —Publishers Weekly
“Meek’s latest novel is wall-to-wall substance but remains accessible and grounded in earthly humaneness with stunning characterization and boldly realized thematic roots in the universal pursuit of youth versus the questionable finality of death; in how wisdom can sustain, and knowledge in wicked hands destroy; and that as many bonds are forged with treachery as are broken. Meek guides readers through these depths, past intersections of biology and morality, science and art, with beauty and deftness.” —Annie Bostrom, Booklist (starred review)
“Richly drawn characters behaving in unexpected ways make Meek’s latest a gem.” —Kirkus Reviews
“Meek is a novelist of Dostoevskyan intensity and seriousness . . . The Heart Broke In is seldom less than compelling. It also has many terrific individual episodes. Meek is good on slightly messed-up family relations. He has a nice sense of the absurd . . . You have to admire the scope and ambition of this operatic saga.” —Theo Tait, The Guardian
“This is a big juicy slab of a book, as thrilling and nourishing as a Victorian three-parter . . . A rich book, very much of the moment . . . It is a generous, kind book, and it is kindness, an immutable quality, that is presented here as the antidote to dogmatic moralising. Like Larkin’s Arundel tomb, The Heart Broke In proves our almost instinct almost true. What will survive of us is love.” —Wynn Wheldon, The Spectator
“James Meek is Britain’s answer to Don DeLillo . . . The Heart Broke In marks a deepening of the vision of The People’s Act of Love . . . Meek writes with taut control. The plot is dreamy, deceptive and allusive, packed with cues and clues . . . Halfway through, the heart breaks in, a real chronology begins, and cool, detached satire gives way to a complex meditation on death and time and the family.” —Brian Morton, The Independent
“Juicy . . . [A] lively culture clash of a novel . . . A novel shimmering with black humour, which for the sheer verve of the writing deserves a long shelf life.” —Lucy Beresford, The Daily Telegraph
“A readable addition to this justifiably acclaimed writer’s oeuvre . . . The biting wit and social satire that characterised We Are Now Beginning Our Descent manifests itself in this novel with an entertaining cast of minor characters . . . Here is a novelist writing fat, complex but readable novels that have something serious to say about the way we live now and the society we live in. Along with Philip Hensher, he is the nearest British fiction has to a John Irving.” —Louise Doughty, The Observer (London)
Praise for The People’s Act of Love
“Remarkable . . . Richly informed and imagined . . . [An] ingenious, intricate novel, a meditation on grand ideas that is also a suspenseful page-turner.” —Boris Fishman, The New York Times Book Review
“Magnificent . . . Heart-pounding . . . Original and breathtaking . . . An altogether soul-shaking novel, tightly mixing pathos and grandeur . . . Meek has created a tremendously impressive work of art, at once serious, upsetting and astonishingly moving.” —Michael Dirda, The Washington Post Book World
“[No] comparisons, much less an inventory of genres, quite capture this novel’s propulsive force . . . Meek continually surprises with an image, a turn of phrase or an idea, sometimes several at once. Yet the richness of his thought never cloys, never congeals. More than anything else, this reviewer envies anyone who picks it up and enjoys the continual rations of delight this novel has to deal out.” —Jesse Berrett, San Francisco Chronicle
“Spellbinding . . . A perfectly realised work . . . A beautifully written novel which, though set in the past, feels like the most contemporary fiction you’ll ever read . . . The People’s Act of Love has a timeless quality; it will be read, referenced, studied and talked about for years to come.” —Irvine Welsh, The Guardian
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This terrific novel by James Meek looks at the lives of some Londoners as we focus on our cultural obsessions with youth, fame, and love. It also shows us the importance of loyalty and honor, and the messiness and complications of family.
We start off the novel with Ritchie Shepherd, who with his wife Karin, were singers in a famous rock group. Ritchie is older (but not so wiser) and now produces a reality show featuring teen talent. Oh, and he's also having a fling with a 15 year old girl who appeared on the show, a deed that is not only illegal and immoral but would most definitely end Ritchie's marriage to Karin as well as his reputation and career.
Ritchie's sister is Bec Shepherd, who at 33 is quite a few years younger than he is. She is everything he is not - she is honorable and honest and works as a scientist trying to eradicate malaria in Tanzania. She's even infected herself with a dangerous parasite in order to further her goals. Bec had recently become engaged to a newspaper editor named Val Oatman, but she really did so because the proposal was unexpected and when she returns the ring to him, he is anything but happy.
Also in love with Bec is Alex Comrie, who used to be the drummer in Ritchie and Karin's band. That drumming was really a lark for him and later on he goes to school and becomes a brilliant gene therapist and wants to come up with a cure for cancer - similar to the aspirations of his beloved brilliant and acclaimed Uncle Harry, who in fact came up with a cure for a certain type of cancer. Uncle Harry's encourages Alex to focus on the element of gene therapy that can reverse aging for reasons that become clear as you read along.
Add into the mix Matthew, Harry's evangelical son and family, an assortment of friends and family, and a man named Colum Donobhan, who just got out of prison for killing Ritchie and Bec's heroic soldier father in Northern Ireland 25 years earlier because their father would not divulge the name of an informant even though he was tortured.
This was an amazing read for me. This book felt epic and ambitious in every way and truly delves into so many different aspects of our culture and how we deal with issues as diverse as celebrity and fame, religion and science, betrayal and vengeance, the quest for youth and relevance, and really at heart, what it means to be human. These characters all felt very real to me and you truly care about them and what happens to them.
This was also an absolute page-turner for me and I am writing this review waaaay too late because I could not put this book down. In fact I'll probably have trouble sleeping because I can't stop thinking about it. It was engaging, profound and at times very funny to boot.
Just terrific. I was a big fan of James Meek's earlier novel, The People's Act of Love: A Novel and I liked this one even more.
Highly recommended.
This brilliant novel explores deep and compelling themes of love and loyalty, parenthood and loss. It delves into the science and politics of global health and academic advance. Blackmail and its ramifications are an undercurrent, and the practitioners are not always adult. Along the way the reader traverses the ridgeline between atheism and fundamentalist belief, Christianity and Islam, in vitro fertilization and sterility, in what can only be described, lamely, as a tour de force.
Meek has well-earned the five stars I've accorded the book. I'd like to add a sixth.
