Product Description

With the insight, humor, and compassion we have come to expect from her, Maeve Binchy tells a story of family, friends, patients, and staff who are part of a heart clinic in a community caught between the old and the new Ireland.

Dr. Clara Casey has been offered the thankless job of establishing the underfunded clinic and agrees to take it on for a year. She has plenty on her plate already—two difficult adult daughters and the unwanted attentions of her ex-husband—but she assembles a wonderfully diverse staff devoted to helping their demanding, often difficult patients.

Before long the clinic is established as an essential part of the community, and Clara must decide whether or not to leave a place where lives are saved, courage is rewarded, and humor and optimism triumph over greed and self-pity.

Heart and Soul is Maeve Binchy at her storytelling best.


From the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1700 in Books
• Published on: 2009-02-17
• Released on: 2009-02-17
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 432 pages

Amazon.com Review
Book Description
With the insight, humor, and compassion we have come to expect from her, Maeve Binchy tells a story of family, friends, patients, and staff who are part of a heart clinic in a community caught between the old and the new Ireland.

Dr. Clara Casey has been offered the thankless job of establishing the underfunded clinic and agrees to take it on for a year. She has plenty on her plate already—two difficult adult daughters and the unwanted attentions of her ex-husband—but she assembles a wonderfully diverse staff devoted to helping their demanding, often difficult patients.

Before long the clinic is established as an essential part of the community, and Clara must decide whether or not to leave a place where lives are saved, courage is rewarded, and humor and optimism triumph over greed and self-pity.

Heart and Soul is Maeve Binchy at her storytelling best.

A Conversation with Maeve Binchy

Question: Your novels often explore the concept of love. Can you name a few of your favorite literary love stories?
Maeve Binchy: I think most people read a love story long before they ever know what true love is like. So we remember the great passions that we read about when we were young. I loved the story of Anthony and Cleopatra, and how Anthony allowed himself to dally with the Queen of Egypt when he should have been back in Rome watching his back. I liked the frenetic, troubled romances in F. Scott Fitzgerald, and the changing patterns of Scarlett O’Hara’s love life in Gone with the Wind.

Q: Heart and Soul is set in a heart clinic. Why did you choose this setting and how does it influence the story?
MB: I set Heart and Soul in a heart clinic because I attend one myself. I have always found it a place of hope and optimism where they teach you how to manage your heart disease and not to be afraid of it. When I was young if anyone had a heart attack we thought it was goodbye. But not nowadays.

It seemed like a good place to set a story, a place where people were slowly getting courage to live their lives to the fullest. And I wanted to make it cheerful and positive and funny, which is what we all need.

Q: The book centers on Clara, the doctor in charge of the clinic, but the book also follows quite an ensemble of characters with intertwining stories. How does your work within the discipline of short story writing contribute to your work within the novel genre?
MB: I like to concentrate on the bit part players, the supporting cast as well as the main characters, so it’s often interesting to pause and follow somebody home to a different life while still connecting them to the main story. Then when that person appears again it is like meeting an old friend.

Because I do write short stories I suppose I find it easy to slip into someone’s life for a short time and then leave.

Q: New characters are joined by a few from past books, including Nora from Evening Class, Maud and Simon from Scarlet Feather, and Quentins itself (if I can call a restaurant a character). How did you decide which characters to bring back to life?
MB: I decided to bring back characters whose lives were not finished and tidied up. I was even wondering myself would Vonni ever find her long lost son? Would Signora be happy when she married Aidan? How the twins Maud and Simon would turn out when they stopped being twelve year olds. I wondered would poor Father Flynn, who was so basically decent, survive in the parish where they were all obsessed with the Holy Well or would he get a more relevant posting. I so enjoyed meeting them all again and I think the readers like it too.

Q: Irish culture is known for its storytelling, both in the oral and written tradition. Do you also enjoy telling stories out loud? Are you the life of the dinner party?
MB: The Irish do love telling stories and we are suspicious of people who don’t have long complicated conversations. There used to be a rule in Etiquette Books that you invited four talkers and four listeners to a dinner party. That doesn’t work in Ireland because nobody knows four listeners. I do talk a lot at dinner parties--I hope not too much but then I love other people to talk also. I am edgy and anxious when people just nod and smile instead of having views on every subject under the sun.

Q: Your books capture the culture of Ireland. Although Ireland has not escaped the recent economic downturn, how has Ireland’s rapid growth--finally joining the ranks of the world’s wealthiest countries following centuries of poverty--influenced your storytelling?
MB: Ireland changed a great deal in my lifetime. People became much more wealthy because of being members of the European community. The influence of the Catholic Church changed--once we feared the clergy and were in awe of them and now it is much easier and more communal. Once no foreigners came to work here since there wasn’t enough work for ourselves, but now it’s multicultural and you could hear twenty languages being spoken all around you. It has been a great help to the country and given us all more confidence.

Q: Your first book was published in 1982. Has your writing process changed over the years? How do you continue to challenge yourself?
MB: When I started writing I used to concentrate on the 50s and 60s when I was young, but I needed to try to become more modern and catch up on today’s Ireland. So I started to watch the young Irish people and talk to them as if they were a different tribe, which in many ways they are!

I discovered that they are not so different to my generation, they have more freedom, more responsibility and more courage than we had but they also have areas of uncertainty and unrequited love as we all did.

Q: What are you working on next?
MB: I am working at the moment on writing a three page outline for another novel. I must make it interesting enough for the publishers to like it and give me the go ahead. It should be in the same style as the books I have already written but not visit the same topics and repeat myself.

Q: Describe a typical day spent writing. Do you have any unusual writing habits?
MB: A typical day is breakfast (grapefruit and Irish soda bread and tea), then on to a big bright work room upstairs. [My husband and I] both try to be at our desks there at 8:30 am and we work until 1 pm. This includes answering mail and filing. We have a secretary one day a week. Then when work is over we have lunch and play a game of chess--we play seven days a week and have been doing so for over thirty years and we are still hopeless at it but love it to bits.

Q: With two writers in one household, do you and your husband give each other feedback or work separately?
MB: We have one long desk in our study upstairs--Gordon [Snell] is at one end and I am at the other. He writes his children’s books and verses and I do my stories. We always read each other our work in the afternoon. The rules are that we must be honest. No false praise. We allow the other ten minutes sulking time if we don’t like what we’ve heard. But then we have to accept or reject the criticism. No one is allowed to brood over it!

Q: What are you reading now? What are some of your favorite books and authors?
MB: I have just begun Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates, which seems terrific. There are so many but off the top of my head here are some names of authors I love: Anne Tyler, Harlan Coben, Lee Child, and David Baldacci.

(Photo © David Timmons)

From Publishers Weekly
Binchy delivers another delightful Binchyesque amalgamation of intersecting lives, this time centering on Clara Casey, a cardiologist whose marriage and career have fallen apart. After she accepts an undesirable post at St. Brigid's Hospital, Clara throws herself into work to forget the humiliation of her husband's many affairs, but it's difficult to escape her home life with two adult daughters who still depend on her as if they were children. Though she stands at the center of the book, Clara cedes the stage to others, such as Declan Carroll, a young doctor at the clinic trying to make a life for himself, and Ania, Clara's assistant, whose affair with a married man forced her to leave her Polish hometown. Beautiful, hardworking and humble, Ania attracts the attention of Carl Walsh, the son of one of the clinic's patients. And so it goes in this novel of intersecting lives that keeps daily drama interesting even when it occasionally sacrifices suspense for realism. In spite of a few dull moments, the collective, charming effect of these story lines suggests that individuals are more connected than they might think. (Mar.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post
From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com Reviewed by Bill Sheehan You don't have to be Irish -- or wait for St. Patrick's Day -- to give these entertaining novels by Maeve Binchy and Frank Delaney a try. Binchy's latest, "Heart and Soul," begins with the establishment of St. Brigid's heart clinic, a small, self-contained community within Dublin. Clara Casey, a cardiologist whose complex personal life includes a pair of difficult daughters and a philandering ex-husband, agrees to run the fledgling clinic for a single year and begins the process of recruiting a suitable staff. The intertwined stories of these doctors and nurses, together with the patients who come to rely on them, form the substance of this likable, sometimes frustrating book. Binchy is adept at juggling multiple story lines and creating genuine drama out of the quotidian problems of life: illness, accidents, misunderstandings, romantic and sexual betrayal. Her work reflects a pervasive generosity of spirit and projects a reassuring quality that is, I think, a central element of her enduring popularity. Binchy believes, with bedrock certainty, that people who possess the necessary measure of good sense, goodwill and energy can overcome, or learn to endure, whatever comes their way. That can be a potent -- and very welcome -- message. Ultimately, the linked stories in "Heart and Soul" constitute an ongoing account of "battles . . . fought and won," of crippling circumstances, like the illnesses that afflict the patients at St. Brigid's, brought slowly but inevitably under human control. All this might resonate more powerfully if the writing were more distinguished. Unfortunately, Binchy's language -- both dialogue and prose -- is rarely more than workmanlike and efficient. At its worst, it descends to the level of low-rent romance fiction. When a priest confronts a deranged young woman, his "big, honest face was aghast at her cunning." A pair of conspiring matchmakers succeed "beyond their wildest dreams." Speaking of her ailing husband, one woman declares: "If anything happened to Aidan, I would not want to live. . . . I couldn't bear a day or night without him now and without seeing his dear face." Despite such lapses, this good-hearted, otherwise quite readable novel offers many honest pleasures and deserves the success it will no doubt achieve. Like Binchy, Frank Delaney is a middling stylist but an engaging, often compelling storyteller. His best-selling epic, "Ireland" (2005), recapitulates the nation's history though the songs and stories of a wandering bard. His latest, "Shannon," is considerably narrower in scope, focusing on the gradual healing of a single damaged soul during the troubled summer of 1922. The title refers both to the long, meandering river that dominates the Irish landscape and to the novel's deeply disturbed protagonist, Robert Shannon. Father Shannon has come to Ireland in the hope of recovering from two distinct crises: his experiences as a chaplain in World War I, which left him traumatized and virtually catatonic, and his subsequent encounter with corruption at the highest levels of the archdiocese of Boston. He arrives in Ireland at a crucial historical moment: The Irish Civil War, a byproduct of the divisive Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921, has just broken out, and the countryside is up in arms. Against this backdrop of political strife and imminent personal danger, Shannon travels up and down the river, searching for his family's roots and for the sense of spiritual coherence that disappeared in the trenches of France. Delaney handles Shannon's therapeutic journey with sympathy and skill, introducing a diverse cast of Irish characters and layering the narrative with the sort of arcane native lore -- historical, cultural and geographic -- that adds a welcome depth of background to the central story. His descriptions of the condition once known as shell shock are detailed and convincing, though his obvious affection for his suffering hero sometimes leads to simplistic overstatement. For example, he describes the young, prewar Father Shannon as a man "incapable of anything but good," a daunting claim to make on anyone's behalf. A more serious problem is the introduction of a dubious -- and lengthy -- subplot involving a hired killer dispatched to Ireland to prevent Father Shannon from divulging what he knows about corrupt practices in America's Catholic hierarchy. This unfortunate turn toward melodrama undermines the narrative for long, unnecessary stretches but doesn't quite destroy it. In the end, Delaney holds his flawed creation together through his considerable narrative gifts and his unapologetic belief in human decency and the healing power of the past.
Copyright 2009, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

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Customer Reviews

So fulfilling.
One of my favorite joys is to sit back with my coffee and read books...Maeve Binchy, is my favorite author and her books make my reading time so fulfilling. In her latest book, Heart and Soul, she returns to the style that made her one of the most comforting authors. Like all her books, Heart and Soul has quite a cast of characters...but the main character is the cardiac specialist at a Dublin clinic named Clara Casey. Clara runs the clinic with her two adult daughters and her ex-husband. Declan, the doctor at the clinic, is a shy young man that lives with his parents. Fiona and Barbara, are the two nurses at the clinic...we also have a young lass named Ania...patients at the clinic and Father Brian Flynn. All these characters have their own back story that Maeve Binchy weaves together like a fine silken rug.

Sitting here, after just reading this novel, I'm searching for words to best describe the book...I'm not sure if I can truly articulate the grandness of the writing...the passion and detail in each character...the meticulous way they were developed. Every aspect of the book causes the reader to lose themselves and become a character in the novel...there isn't anything bad I can say about it. The characters are strong, independent, and able to carry the story alone...but become a brilliant force when combined. Older characters from previous novels even find their way into Heart and Soul. I guess what I'm trying to say is...this is a great novel and a return to form by an ingenious author.........my other favorite novel this year was Geo Tin's masterpiece Sirens: Sirens (Enchanted Song) rated one of the best novels of the year.

Heart and Soul
I am a huge fan of Maeve Binchy! I have every one of her books, however, this one I found alittle boring and was disappointed. I waited and waited for her to come out with a new book...but was alittle let down.

Maeve Binchy's latest
I truly wanted to love this book as I have so enjoyed most of Maeve Binchy's prior work. However, I found that the story was a bit tedious and not as enjoyable for me as some of her past works.

The story revolves around a heart health clinic in Dublin and Dr. Clara Casey who runs the heart health center. Various relationships that evolve are followed and explored via characters who work at or are involved with the health center.

The book was good but not as great as previous books like Tara Road, Quintons and Scarlet Feather. I was just not as drawn into the story as I was with the author's other work.