I wondered whether it was a peculiarly English trait to feel like an impostor all one’s life, to fear that at any moment one might be rumbled – or whether this was a common human failing.” She spoke English with an accent but quite naturally. When she had finished speaking, she looked down at her hands before daring to raise her eyes again and engage the rest of us with a smile. There was something about the three-part procedure that made you want to see it again.

Dark house, by which once more I stand’ by Alfred, Lord Tennyson describes the speaker’s night as he seeks out the old joys of friendship. I pulled out some money and handed it over. With what looked like some reluctance, she undressed. When she was naked, she came and stood beside me. She took my hand and ran it up over her abdomen and breasts. The belly was rounded, and there were small fat deposits above the hips; the lumpy navel had been botched by the obstetrician. Her skin was smooth, and there was a look of concentration in her eyes—not kindness or concern, more a sort of junior-employee focus. I felt extremely tired and wanted to close my eyes. At the same time I felt an obligation to this woman; it seemed we were joined in this thing now, for better or for worse. A sweeping drama about the madness of war and the power of love, with passages as "compelling and alive as anything he has written since Birdsong " ( The Guardian ) So I just put the client on hold while I dial up the airline and photocopy the schedule,” said the travel agent, helping himself to red wine. “It’s not exactly brain surgery.”Luisa, meanwhile, falls madly in love with him after their first meeting. (“You were beautiful . . . I saw there was so much more to you and only I could understand it.”) so I’m thinking, What about me? You know, isn’t it time I had a say in all this? And … What’s that?”

Sebastian Faulks’s 13th novel is the work of a man with an eerie mastery of the form in its modern, popular incarnation. There is everything here: love, loss, death, war, history, memory, ideas, travel, friendship, rivalry, chance – and sex, plenty of that. The passages set in the trenches of Anzio in 1944 are as compelling and alive as anything he has written since Birdsong, his huge-selling 1993 novel about British tunnel-diggers at the Somme. The intricacies of war suit Faulks’s love of research and his mastery of it – how to layer and find ornament in it, what German tanks to mention, what level of ignorance to assume on the part of his reader. And there’s something about the everyday nearness of men being ripped apart by flying metal that raises Faulks’s officer-class prose to its sharpest pitch.” — The Guardian A few minutes later she was spread-eagled on the rug by Hoffman’s fireplace, intent on a repeat. I felt reluctant to start again, but I didn’t want to deny her the chance of earning more. My motive was not so different from the one that made me, at the end of the evening at the village hall, offer to dance with Paula Wood’s mother: courtesy, perhaps, or an ignorance of what women want. A bit,” said Donald, blinking. “I was sent to study in Rome for three months after school. And you?” A highly evocative, artfully written and constructed Faulks' jam, that not only has an unbelievably almost beautiful critique of war, but somehow also questions how we deal with those with mental health issues, how they are really treated as people; that not being enough, there are also themes around hereditary, familial secrets and lies, the romantic 'the one', how wars destroy possible futures as well as the present; this book also covers huge nuggets like fate, destiny, sanity and sacrifice! I can imagine some writers writing this book and giving up publishing afterwards, knowing that this is as good as it gets for them.... that's how good this book is. And in case you missed it, it asks the question whether life is a collection of events or how we remember those events, how they made us feel? 9.5 out of 12.

From Pereira’s notes: “the biggest part of the human personality is determined by the way it remembers. Not by what it remembers but by how it remembers it.” If you have read Faulks' Birdsong, this might have a familiar feel to it. Although there are similarities, it really is a different novel (not just a different war). There were many ways in which I felt a personal connection. My father's father was killed in WWI, for example, though my father was old enough to have known his father. It helped me understand better what it is for a boy to grow up without a father, where my own experience was as a girl growing up without one. That is but one link I felt, but also an instance that broadened my understanding.

This is a complex tale about madness in various forms: madness as an incurable illness, madness brought on by the horrors of war, madness triggered by one’s genetic inheritance and another kind of madness, the madness of falling headlong into love. For Robert, fighting on the Italian front in World War 2, his life becomes irreparably altered when he meets and falls in love with a beautiful Italian girl, Luisa. But love, like armies, cannot always conquer all. When the speaker used to come to this house his heart would speed up with excitement. His hands would reach out, knowing that Hallam would be there to support him. Now though, the waiting goes on and on. This stanza ends with the phrase, “waiting for a hand.” The line break forces a blank space between line four and the first line of stanza two. This symbolizes the void that has opened up in the speaker’s mind. It is also like a question and a time to probe for a response.

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There’s a lot to get through. Perhaps too much. Characters assumed to be at least to be of functional interest are thrown overboard. That initial teasing sense of the uncanny is waved away as the narrative grows weighty with purpose – affairs of the intellect, trauma, anguish, redemption. Having earlier strained at suspense, Faulks now aims at poignancy. Neither entirely seizes the emotions. Mood swings and tonal bumps are a hazard of fiction that aspires to be both literary and “popular”. It’s a frustration here, even when set beside the novel’s strengths. My voice always displeased me. It sounded sandpapery yet insincere; it had something of the simper in it. I sat down with a pad and a pen as the tape rewound and braced myself for my own familiar and irritating tones: I had the narcissist’s dread of myself as others heard me.

For years, Robert has refused to discuss his past. After the war was over, he refused to go to reunions, believing in some way that denying the killing and the deaths of his friends and fellow soldiers, would mean he wouldn't be defined by the experience. Suddenly, he can't keep the memories from overtaking him. But can he trust his memories and can we believe what other people tell us about theirs? In the second stanza the speaker confirms that when he waits for his friend’s presence, he waits in vain. There is no longer a “hand” for him to clasp.” It, and the emotional stability it represented, has gone away. The poem begins with the speaker describing standing in front of the house of Arthur Hallam, the deceased friend for whom ‘In Memoriam”was written. Tennyson, who is usually considered to be the speaker, is looking across the lawn at the house. It’s dark inside. The experiences he used to have there are long since gone. They passed on alongside his friend. Reminiscent of Birdsong as well as John Fowles’s The Magus and Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, this does not have the power of Faulks’s previous work but is a capable study of how war stories and love stories translate into personal history. I had such high hopes for this novel by Sebastian Faulks having loved a previous novel called : Birdsong but while I didn't dislike Where My Heart Used To Beat it certainly didn't set my heart beating any faster either.No: even that faint hope is then cruelly snatched from us, as it was from the poet, by continuing on to the next line and discovering that that ‘far away’ refers not to Hallam’s location but to the distant sound of the workaday world starting up again: My fellow passengers were soon opening their puzzle books or gazing up at the bulkhead to watch the film. My seat was at an awkward angle, so the light striking the screen made the characters appear in colored negative, like oil in water. The passenger in front seemed gripped enough by it as he sat forwards and munched through his bag of nuts.