Please open https://hotaudiobook.com ONLY on your standard browser Safari, Chrome, Microsoft or Firefox to download full audiobooks of your choice for free.

Title: The Tell-Tale Heart

Author: Jill Dawson

Narrator: Martyn Waites, David Thorpe

Format: Unabridged

Length: 7 hrs and 40 mins

Language: English

Release date: 05-01-14

Publisher: Isis Publishing Ltd

Ratings: 3 of 5 out of 1 votes

Genres: Fiction, Contemporary

Publisher's Summary:

Patrick, a 50-year-old professor of American studies, drinker, and womaniser, has been given six months to live. In a rural part of Cambridgeshire, a teenager dies in a motorcycle accident. When his heart is transplanted into Patrick's chest, the lives of two strangers are forever conjoined.

Patrick makes a good recovery from surgery, but has the strange feeling that his old life "won't have him". He discovers that his donor's name was Drew Beamish, and becomes intensely curious, not only about Drew but what shaped him: his family and culture, the ancestor who took part in the famous Littleport riots of 1816, and the bleak yet beautiful landscape of the Fens. Patrick longs to know the story of his heart.

Members Reviews:

Mysteries of the Heart

The story of this novel is based upon a heart transplant, and asks the question - does a recipient of this, the most symbolic of organs, take on the characteristics of the donor? Or can any personality change as result of the surgery - if not purely scientific in itself - be attributed instead to the simple fact of having received a second chance?

The novel pulses its way along by way of a three voice narrative, in seven parts. It details the backstory of both recipient and donor, together with an ancestor of the donor, and how they come to be connected via the red card. The reader gets the feeling - shared by the recipient, the selfish 50 year old Patrick - that he doesn't deserve this second chance. But he's got it all the same, and he knows his outlook on life has changed. And then there's the donor, his story held me the most: sixteen year old Drew, who's been led by his heart all his short life, and is suffused with the passion of his ancestors. He doesn't get to fully explore even his first chance at life, it all seems so unfair. So ordinary, in fact. We can all feel that.

But for all the potential in the subject matter, the writing isn't sentimental; instead there's a real emotional authenticity and so many telling details that the characters feel like they're springing from the pages. I'm still thinking about them now, days after finishing the book. In fact, I read it too quickly: the drive in the narrative - itself like a beating heart, at once concise and vital - compelled me to finish it in a matter of days. So now I'll have to read it again, and this time I'll dwell on every word and image. Because what's also remarkable about this novel is the way that the Fens become a character in themselves; reminiscent of the moors in Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights. The plot simply couldn't exist without them. But it won't be any trial to re-read, because Jill Dawson is brilliant at layering meaning upon detail, and vice versa, so that the more you read the more you discover.

And the answer to the burning question? Broccoli. Read it, and then you can make up your own mind.