Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Unavailable
    The Tell-Tale Heart: A Novel
    Unavailable
    The Tell-Tale Heart: A Novel
    Unavailable
    The Tell-Tale Heart: A Novel
    Ebook292 pages4 hours

    The Tell-Tale Heart: A Novel

    By Jill Dawson

    3.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    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.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateFeb 10, 2015
    ISBN9780062348814
    Unavailable
    The Tell-Tale Heart: A Novel
    Author

    Jill Dawson

    Jill Dawson is the author of Trick of the Light, Magpie, Fred and Edie, which was short-listed for the Whitbread Novel Award and the Orange Prize, Wild Boy, Watch Me Disappear, which was long-listed 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 UK publications, including The Guardian, The Times, Vogue, and Harper's Bazaar. She lives in Norfolk with her husband and two sons.

    Read more from Jill Dawson

    Related to The Tell-Tale Heart

    Related ebooks

    Literary Fiction For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Royals Retreat

      Mar 22, 2020

      Royals Retreat
      3 min read

    • Article

      Friend Or Foe?

      Aug 24, 2023

      Sitting on the grass beside my girlfriend Grace, I spotted a familiar face approaching from across the park. ‘Can I join you?’ Chelsea, then 17, smiled, plonking herself down. It was March 2018 and I’d been with Grace, then 16, for six months. I was

      4 min read

    • Article

      After the Storm

      Nov 25, 2023

      After the Storm
      6 min read

    • Article

      In His hands

      Oct 28, 2021

      In His hands
      2 min read

    • Article

      Why My First Thanksgiving in Prison Was The Best One I’d Had In Forever

      Nov 25, 2020

      Between being sober, getting a visit and having a surprise feast with the mean girls in my unit, I still cherish that day.

      4 min read

    • Article

      The Problem With Lilly

      Feb 1, 2024

      The Problem With Lilly
      6 min read

    • Article

      Finding Peace—and Briefly, Freedom—at My Grandfather’s Funeral

      Oct 11, 2019

      “Saying goodbye with the people who loved him—and me—I remember that I am not the tomb that imprisons me.”

      6 min read

    • Article

      The Way Things TURN OUT

      Jun 3, 2020

      The Way Things TURN OUT
      7 min read

    • Article

      The Boy Who Cried Wolf

      Jun 9, 2020

      Josh Turner from Austin, Texas The egg landed with a splat on the truck window. ‘Bullseye,’ grinned my buddy Dave*. Hiding in the shadows, as the car drove past, we could see the driver gesticulating furiously. It was 31 October 1990 – Halloween – a

      4 min read

    • Article

      Too late FOR LOVE?

      Jun 8, 2022

      Too late FOR LOVE?
      8 min read

    • Article

      My first year WITHOUT MY MOM

      Mar 16, 2020

      My first year WITHOUT MY MOM
      3 min read

    • Article

      Baking Through a Plague

      Jun 12, 2020

      Baking Through a Plague
      8 min read

    • Article

      September’s BOOK CLUB

      Aug 4, 2022

      It’s been a decade since Hannah was at Oxford, yet she’ll never forget it. Her room-mate, April, was killed by one of the university porters. Now he’s dead and Hannah wonders if she helped send an innocent man to prison. But if Hannah digs too deep,

      4 min read

    • Article

      How to Buy a Used Car During a Wildfire

      Jan 14, 2019

      I do not laugh but the children do. “I hate these fucking places,” I think again, turning the radio back on. The post How to Buy a Used Car During a Wildfire appeared first on The Millions.

      12 min read

    • Article

      Betty White (1922–2021)

      Jan 13, 2022

      Betty White (1922–2021)
      2 min read

    • Article

      A Deadly Affair

      Aug 6, 2020

      A Deadly Affair
      4 min read

    • Article

      Gone But Not Deleted

      Jul 1, 2020

      Gone But Not Deleted
      8 min read

    • Article

      Just Passing

      Aug 17, 2020

      Zoe cracks the curtain in the bay window and watches as he bounces from one foot to another in the cold. Tap, tap, tap, he goes at the letterbox. But she shouldn’t even let him in. He’s trouble. He throws his arms out and shouts through the glass: “S

      5 min read

    • Article

      Kids & Angels

      Jun 25, 2022

      Kids & Angels
      4 min read

    • Article

      Books

      Oct 4, 2019

      1 John Grisham delivers a classic legal thriller with “The Guardians”. The story follows Quincy Miller who was arrested when a lawyer was shot and killed at his desk. Twenty-two years later, he appeals his case with the Guardian Ministries, a group t

      1 min read

    • Article

      Silent THREAT

      Oct 7, 2021

      Silent THREAT
      5 min read

    Reviews for The Tell-Tale Heart

    3.5/5

    15 ratings5 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 3/5
      I won this book in exchange for an honest review.The premise of this novel is what appealed to me, however I don't think the author pulled it off. The protagonist of the story is a bit of a jerk, screwing around behind his wife's back and drinking. As karma would have it, his heart is on its last leg. The story opens up with Patrick, a 50+ man, having just had a heart transplant; the heart donated from a young 16 year old boy. My guess is that realizing his own mortality and how quickly it can be taken away Patrick becomes "bored by the things that once enticed him" (from the back cover). I don't feel he got bored as much as he had a major wake up call.The plot then focuses on Patrick, his new outlook on life, and how he tries to find out more about his young donor. The potential is there but the author isn't able to expand on this plot. A philosophical question becomes the focus of the story as it is debated whether an organ transplanted to another individual carries a part of the soul, which would explain Patrick's flashbacks. This is a very deep concept and I would have liked to read more about that connection as it seems to be the crux of the story. Unfortunately the author just skims the surface. I don't know if I cared about Patrick as a character although Dawson did portray him very realistically. Drew is a minor character but there was so much more to his story that the author could have capitalized on. I did like the author's style of writing. She is a British author so there are words and phrases in there that need a little translation but are easy to figure out.
    • 3/5
      Patrick getting on with his everyday life after receiving a heart transplant, Willie's life 200 years before and Drew's life up to his accident. Like reading three different books in one. Just people going on about life and mussing about their feelings. Not really any "Wow" moments but a good read none the less.
    • 4/5
      When my daughter got her license a few months ago, they asked her if she wanted to be an organ donor. She didn't know how to answer the question but when she turned to me to ask what I thought, I told her that yes, she should register as one. As much as I hope there's never any need for that information to be on record, it is important stuff. In fact, a friend of mine had to make the heart-wrenching and unimaginable decision to donate her teenaged son's organs not too long before I stood in the DMV with my daughter. That we all have the chance to give a stranger a life saving gift is amazing, especially in the midst of terrible tragedy. And I have to imagine that the hope that some spark of your loved one lives on in the actual flesh, blood, and muscle of their donation gives families some shred of peace in their loss. There are countless stories out there about people who are organ recipients who feel a connection with their donor, some who go on to have relationships with their donor's family, and some who say that their tastes, interests, and temperament changed after the transplant. I imagine that no matter what, the recipient must always feel curiousity about the donor whose gift allowed them life. Certainly this is the case in Jill Dawson's newest novel, The Tell-Tale Heart. Patrick is a university professor, fifty years old, a philandering womanizer, whose heart failure was so advanced he was given an outside chance of making it another 6 months. But a sixteen year old boy on a motorcycle had an accident and because of the donor card in his wallet, Patrick has a much longer future ahead of him. The question is what his future looks like. When Patrick wakes up in hospital after the transplant, his ex-wife is at his bedside and he has no grasp of the enormity of what has just occurred. He certainly knows it intellectually but he doesn't know it deep in his newly transplanted heart. Drew Beamish is a troubled and rebellious teenager. His family is poor but proud and he's got great potential even if he'll have to overcome a lack of advantages in order to use it. But like his ancestor before him, he is close to beaten before he ever even gets started and in many ways, he lives down to that expectation. He is fairly aggressively pursuing a relationship with his teacher at school and after his father's early and unexpected death from a heart attack after a farm accident, he pushes at the boundaries pre-drawn for him all the harder. And it is this raging against his fate that lands him squarely on the motorcycle that speeds his death. The novel's first person narration alternates mainly between Patrick, post-operation, and Drew, pre-accident, with a short chapter focused on Drew's ancestor, his role in the uprisings in the Fens, and his own enduring love two hundred years prior. For Drew, there is a real hopelessness about the future; ironically his death gives Patrick the opportunity to even have a future, filled with hope or no. And with this second chance, Patrick experiences subtle personality changes, reevaluating his past relationships and family ties, and must face head on the question of what obligation he has to Drew and Drew's memory simply because he was the recipient of Drew's heart. The landscape of the novel is bleak and blighted, the flat, former swampland filled in as agricultural land. The tone of the novel is atmospheric, spare, and oddly unemotional. The strength of the story lies in the writing. It's a very literary novel that examines what part of us resides in our heart, what spark of our person remains there as long as it beats, even in the chest of another human being. As Patrick feels the constant beating of Drew's heart in his chest, he must take stock of a life squandered and a life cut short and decide where the steady beats of the future will take him. Dawson has raised some intriguing questions and laid them inside the lives of two rather unexceptional characters, who become exceptional over the course of the narrative, connected by the most basic, physical sign of life, a fully functioning heart.
    • 4/5
      This is the tale of a heart, told by its new and previous owners.Patrick is recovering in hospital after a life-saving heart transplant. From his narrative, it is soon clear that he is quite an unpleasant man. He is a middle aged academic, facing charges of sexual harassment at work, which he claims are from a vindictive ex. He drinks and smokes too much, and may well be set on wasting this second chance with a new heart. Somehow, though, he is conscious of the new organ and gradually starts to wonder about the donor. Drew, the dead 17 year old whose heart Patrick has inherited also tells his story - while he has been in a lot of trouble at school he is a more sympathetic character - despite his youth he seems less self absorbed.The third story is historical - Willie Beamiss and his father were caught up in riots in Littleport, Cambridgeshire, a response to dire poverty and injustice just after the Napoleonic Wars. Apart from the family connection, I never quite understood the link between Willie's story and the present day tales, but this was a vivid and compelling part of the book. Willie's life, like Patrick's, does depend on someone else's death.Patrick has treated others badly for a lot of his life, but through his conversations with other characters, including his ex wife Helen, his son, the transplant co-ordinator Maureen, and others, he becomes a more rounded character, not just that selfish, obnoxious man he appears to be at the beginning.This was an enjoyable and thought provoking read.
    • 4/5
      As Jill Dawson's The Tell-Tale Heart begins, we meet Patrick Robson, a professor and philanderer who has just had the good fortune to have a successful heart transplant. As he recovers, he becomes transfixed not only by his donor, Andrew Beamish's life, but with the more distant history of Drew's ancestors, farm laborers and shoemakers who were implicated in the Littleport Riots of 1816. As Patrick rediscovers the life he had been in danger of losing, the stories of Drew Beamish and Willie Beamiss entwine with his own, in a way that is distinctly difficult to explain but which make for a compelling novel.Dawson's flawed characters are ordinary, at best, but on the whole generally unlikeable, yet she portrays them in a gentle, sympathetic way that allows readers to look past their unpleasant surfaces and understand their hearts. In fact, her male narrators are so utterly convincing that, at times, it's easy to forget that the author is a woman. Patrick is a prickly sort, a womanizer who had a child with another woman while still married to his wife. He's curious, but not terribly sentimental about the origins of his newly acquired heart. He's grateful with a sense of not deserving a new lease on life. He doesn't believe all the hype about a new heart changing his preferences or his personality. The surgery and its aftermath are well handled, in that, while that Patrick doesn't change utterly, it's obvious he's going through something profound that's working a slow, realistic change in him. He's discovering things about his new life that he never bothered to consider in his old and finally seeing his past from a perspective other than his own. Drew, the heart's donor, is a sexually frustrated miscreant of sorts who just lost his father to a farming accident and is attempting to romance his much older teacher. He's haunted by the story of his distant ancestor who was caught up in the Littleport Riots of 1816, whose story Dawson also weaves into her novel. He's definitely not a very lovable character in his own right, but as his world crumbles a little more each day under the hopelessness of a future eking out a living in the Fens just like his father and his father's father and so on, even he becomes a character that we can understand and even relate to as he fails to outpace the frustration that pursues him that even he can hardly put into words.The Tell-Tale Heart is no warm, fuzzy sentimental story about a heart that makes its way from tragedy to renewal, rather it is a much more penetrating look at interconnectedness between a boy and his forbear, between a man and the boy whose heart gives him a chance to carve out a more meaningful life. It's a story about patterns repeating, about love that dooms and love that saves. The Tell-Tale Heart takes aim at the heart's ability, both literal and figurative, to sustain us, and it definitely hits the mark.