Doing the heart good

by Neil Bissoondath

"The beginning of Neil Bissoondath's new novel marks the end of a seventy-year-old man's independent life. Six months later, living with his daughter and her family, the smell of his destruction still hanging in his pyjamas, he goes shopping for Christmas presents, buying his daughter a pen and writing paper. But the pen, lying dormant in its presentational box, propels him in a different direction, towards the one thing he has left: his memory, his past, that familiar territory unfailingly inhabited by a stranger's life - alien, inexplicable, untrustworthy.". "As he describes his time and begins to clothe himself once more in the apparel that was him, his voice shakes off his age; there appears a new luster to his skin; he becomes. And the remembrance of love and quarrel, friendship and betrayal, war and peace - and the sudden brutality which can assault them all - lends coherence to a confused present, revealing the thread that connects him to a new life with his daughter, son-in-law