The Heart Broke In

A major new novel from the author of the international bestseller The People’s Act of Love

Ritchie Shepherd, aging former pop star and wildly successful producer of a reality teen talent show, is starting to trip over the intricacy of his own lies. Gallingly, his sister, Bec, a scientist developing a crucial vaccine, is as addicted to truth-telling as Ritchie is to falsehood. Ritchie relies on her certitude even as he seethes with resentment. A devastating chain of events is set into motion when Bec tells her fiancé, Val, a powerful tabloid editor, that she can’t bring herself to marry him after all. Val has set himself up as the moral arbiter of the nation, which will turn out to be impeccable camouflage for an elaborate revenge plot intended to destroy Bec by exposing the people who are close to her—which now include Alex, a brilliant researcher in gene therapies who is so desperate to have a family of his own that Bec finds herself willing to lie and cheat in order to get him what he wants.

The Heart Broke In is a novel about everything that matters to us now. Rich and compendious, its themes include but are not limited to: children, celebrity, secrets and shame, the science of immortality, falls from grace, acts of terror, the widening gap between rich and poor, the death of privacy, the unbridled rise of tabloid culture, invisible heroism, and the wonderful, terrible inescapability of family. A big-hearted epic in the manner of Tolstoy, it’s also as shrewd, starkly funny and of-the-moment as Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom or Jeffrey Eugenides’s The Marriage Plot. Most of all, it is a staggeringly good read, fiction with the reverberating resonance of truth.