Carole Angier

The Dying Light

Scarred Hearts

By

Old Street Publishing 280pp £14.99 order from our bookshop

Both the front and back covers of Scarred Hearts carry a passionate endorsement from Paul Bailey: ‘A masterpiece’. Now, readers, we all have our favourite critics, and one of mine is Paul Bailey. Whenever I have fallen in serious literary love – with Jean Rhys, with Primo Levi – Paul has got there before me. I would have liked to follow him again with Max Blecher, who wrote three short books before dying of TB of the spine at only twenty-nine. Scarred Hearts is indeed impressive – intense, original, disturbing. But a masterpiece, no. Rather, it is what you might expect: a striking early work by someone who might have written a masterpiece one day. 

Sign Up to our newsletter

Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.

Follow Literary Review on Twitter

  • Last Tweets

    • 'The characters in many of these stories are trapped in the obsessive present tense of their own thoughts; in the m… ,
    • 'Libraries, for much of their existence, have embodied in microcosm many of the characteristics of the totalitarian… ,
    • 'Moss and Cynthia buy several properties through which to launder their ill-gotten gains, take lots of drugs, have… ,
    • 'Never mind the imperial cult. This is the cult of Boris. What happened to Rome?' From the LR archive:… ,
    • Thirty-two years ago this month, we published Muriel Spark's short story, 'A Playhouse Called Remarkable' Read it… ,
    • Time travel, bicycles and white horses populate @WomackPhilip's roundup of children's books by @marcussedgwick,… ,
    • RT : Joanna Kavenna’s ‘Cooking with Trotsky’s Frying Pan’ in June’s is the most well written and interesting… ,
    Follow Us