#BlogTour ‘Your Still Beating Heart’ by Tyler Keevil

About the book…

All it takes to change your life is a single moment.

A random stabbing on a London bus leaves a young woman widowed and detached from her previous world.

Stripped of a future that should have been hers, she impulsively books a trip to Prague – the city where she and her husband got engaged. But in the midst of a bleak winter, isolated and numb, she can do little more than wander the cobbled streets – until she receives an intriguing proposition. There’s a job for someone just like her. All she needs to do is pick something up, and drive back. Just once. Only ever once.

Stylish and daring, this high-stakes thriller explores what happens when a curve ball skews life out of all recognition

My thanks to ed_pr for my gifted review copy of ‘Your Still Beating Heart’ which is out in hardcover and e-book formats from September 10th, published by Myriad Editions.

I can genuinely see why this book is being so lauded, and talked about, rarely does grief get given such a canvas to paint on, with such poetic strokes, as it does here.

From the very first page I felt pulled into this monochromatic landscape, where in the absence of love, of her lifetime companion, and with nothing left to stay for, Eira (Welsh for snow by the way) takes off for Prague, the location of her husband, Tod’s, proposal of marriage.

A job she never really wanted, possessions she divests herself of, all discarded to make way for an existence where the wheels are taken off, she can give free reign to a grief over a life unlived, children unborn, and an unrequited heart . The chill in the air seems to call to her so that she can freeze her loss in this time, in this space, not get over it, not to move on, but to stay in a semi-permanent state of loss.

The urgency of her feelings are communicated so well by the use of present tense and first person narration, you really get the sense that Eira is talking directly to you, it pulls you into an icy embrace and does not let go. You bear witness to her travels, her pain, her decision making, even though she has nothing to lose, you want to reach into the pages and stop her from taking on this one, small job, this one errand which she has been asked to do.

Her very vulnerability and lack of connections in, or out, of Prague make her highly valuable because if it goes wrong, there is nothing for her to go back to. But in the course of this journey, from the senseless stabbing of her husband to the lack of closure, or retribution she has, to the seemingly reckless connections that she makes with unsavoury people once she starts to run out of money.

It seems that being allowed to languish in your grief is a luxury only afforded to those who can pay for it.

Knowing what she has been through, you begin to sense that she has either made a decision that will end her life, or one that will bring her back and , like a defribillator, restore a regular sinus rhythm in place of arrythmia.

I loved this literary thriller so much, it transcends genre tropes to become something  unique and outstanding in what is, a very crowded field at present. It is the first novel that I have read by Tyler Keevil and I loved it, he balances the needs of his characters and his readers on a fine knife edge, never assuming or taking for granted our investment in the outcome of Eira’s decision making.

About the author…

Tyler was raised in Vancouver, Canada. He first came to the UK in 1999 to study English at Lancaster University. He returned home to finish his degree, and after graduating undertook a variety of bizarre jobs, working as a treeplanter, a landscape gardener, a deckhand on a fishing barge, a ‘greenhorn’ in the shipyards, a restaurant busser and a kayak shop assistant. After paying back his student loan, and saving up some money, he moved to Prague to try his hand at being a starving writer – the only problem being that he didn’t know how to write yet. The money ran out before he learned, and after a brief stint living in Birmingham, he moved to Wales in 2003.

While working part-time cleaning toilets at a petrol station, Tyler committed to learning the craft, and after picking up a handful of short fiction awards – including a Writer of the Year Award from Writers Inc. of London – he began selling his stories to magazines. He is interested both in literary and slipstream fiction, and has been published in New Welsh Review, Planet, Transmission, Dream Catcher, Black Static, and On Spec, among others. A translation of his story, ‘Masque of the Red Clown’ has also recently been commissioned by the French-Canadian magazine, Solaris. Tyler has also written for the screen; a short film he wrote recently aired on ITV Wales, whilst another picked up the Welsh Dragon Award at the Newport International Film Festival. Welsh editors have always been supportive of his writing, from Arthur Smith to Dafydd Prys to Francesca Rhydderch to Helle Michelson, and now more recently Lucy Llewellyn at Parthian.

Like most Canadians, Tyler enjoys his winter sports, including hockey and snowboarding, but since coming to Wales he has discovered the wonders of hiking and camping – particular along the Pembrokeshire coast. He currently works part-time in a factory near his hometown of Llanidloes, and lectures in Creative Writing at the University of Gloucestershire.

Links-http://www.tylerkeevil.pc-q.net/

Twitter @TylerKeevil @MyriadEditions @ed_pr