Craftsmanship rescues Faulks’s latest from tedium

Fiction; Where My Heart UsedTo Beat; By Sebastian Faulks; Hutchinson, €19

Sebastian Faulks: intelligence and craftTony O'Shea

There’s something oddly uneven about Sebastian Faulks’s new novel. The British novelist is well known for achieving a winning combination of popular fiction and high literature – for examples, consider his fourth novel Birdsong or his magnum opus Human Traces.

But here, in Faulks’s 13th outing, the drama isn’t quite fraught enough, the romance isn’t quite ...