Strange Heart Beating by Eli Goldstone

Recently bereaved English academic Seb is struggling with the loss of his wife Leda, so visits her native country to learn more about her and divert his encroaching pit of grief. By uprooting from his safe haven of intellectualism in London to the visceral rawness of rural Latvia, Seb finds Leda had an identity and past entirely discrete from the one he thought he knew.

At the same time, Goldstone lets us into the head of Seb's dearly beloved through excerpts from her adolescent diary. The facility with which she flits between the two very different points of view shows a chameleon-like technical ability, while her beautifully simple phrasing often reveals far more than the words themselves. Whether delivered from the lips of the teenage Leda or the grieving Seb, Goldstone’s prose is laden with meaning, dark wit and a rich undercurrent of melancholy.

Leda was killed by a swan – a death that's implausible, slightly ridiculous and utterly tragic all at once. In fact, these epithets are fair descriptions of the book as a whole; by turns the reader might find themselves scoffing in mock disbelief, smiling wryly and fighting back true emotion. With this compact, compelling and very powerful debut, Goldstone has signposted herself as a talented chronicler of human emotions and of the terrifying void that awaits us at the end of life’s journey – both for the dead and for those left behind.