How Much the Heart Can Hold

by Bernardine Evaristo, Grace McCleen, Donal Ryan, Rowan Hisayo Buchanan, Carys Bray

First published 2016

Seven different people navigate the complex landscape of love, loss, and connection in this intricate mosaic of human emotion. From a grieving father to a lonely nurse, from a refugee seeking belonging to a woman wrestling with unexpected pregnancy, each character carries a fragmented story of what love demands and destroys. As their seemingly separate experiences slowly interweave, the novel reveals how heartache can simultaneously fracture and bind human experience. Their stories emerge like overlapping watercolors, each rendering a different shade of vulnerability, resilience, and the mysterious ways humans heal and hurt each other. Some connections are deliberate; some are accidental. But all pulse with the raw, unpredictable electricity of human feeling.

Genres: fiction, literary-fiction, contemporary, 21st-century, contemporary-romance, family-drama

Vibes: atmospheric, intimate, lyrical, thought-provoking

Tropes: found-family, interweaving-narratives

151 pages · Hardcover · Sceptre

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