The Library of Heartbeats

LoveReading Says

A dreamily beautiful breeze to read, Laura Imai Messina’s The Library of Heartbeats tells a profound story of loss, love, memories and the magic of finding friendship through intergenerational bonds. Also incisive on childhood and how grief really feels, it’s a tale that catches you unaware (translation: beware of breaking into tears on the bus). Uncannily, it resonates with raw real-life life experiences while also radiating soulful magic. I adored it.

The little island of Teshima in southwest Japan is home to the Heartbeat Archive. It is itself a heart that “contracts with the irregular beat of the waves. The tides prolong its pulse, a beat or two is sometimes skipped. But it always begins again.” 

So begins this gorgeous story that sees two souls connect in the city of Kamakura — forty-year-old children’s book illustrator Shuichi and eight-year-old Kenta. Feeling “extinguished” by loss, Shuichi is comforted by Kenta’s presence. Unbeknownst to him, the boy and his mother had shared a special bond. Through Kenta, Shuichi realises “this was how you know you care about someone: when you see them where they aren’t.” In time, a deeper, unexpected, heartbreakingly beautiful bond is revealed, and so they voyage to the Heartbeat Archive on an extraordinary pilgrimage.

Alongside being an incredible story about how we might live with loss and overcome loneliness, The Library of Heartbeats is brilliant on how adults tend to detrimentally simplify children: “We think of them only as small, good, and simple. But children are much more complicated and melancholic than we adults think… and those incredible tools that they do have — irrationality, boundless imagination, the ability to laugh at the silliest things… aren’t accepted by adults.” What’s more, “the whole universe rests in their tiny hands.” Sublime.

Joanne Owen

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