Your Still Beating Heart
From its show-stopping opening scene, Keevil’s tightly plotted page turner is full of momentum and unforgettable characters. Moving, profound and ultimately joyful, it turns on an exceptionally clever twist and is as revealing in its psychological acuity as it is in its portrait of organised crime.
All it takes to change a life is a single moment. A random stabbing on a London bus leaves Eira stripped of a future that should have been hers and propels her into a life skewed out of all recognition. In Prague, the city where she and her husband got engaged, the city where now she flees to in her grief, a chance meeting leads to an intriguing proposition. There’s a small job for someone like her: someone without a criminal record or personal connections; someone willing to take a minor risk. All she needs to do is pick something up, and drive back. Just once. Only ever once.
Her mission takes her to a place where life is cheap and sordid deals are done. Risking her own life to save another, she must confront unspeakable evil and outrun those who would betray her.
Your Still Beating Heart can be ordered direct from publisher Myriad Editions or through your local bookstore (ISBN 978-1-912408-62-7). It is published in Spain by AdN, in France by Editions du Seuil, and in Italy by HarperCollins. Check out the stunning trailer created by Editions du Seuil below - if ever there was a book crying out for a film adaptation, surely this is it…
Equally compelling and unsettling, this razor-sharp thriller reminds us that, for life to be truly lived, we must know death. In loss we confront our true nature, though we might not recognise the person we discover. In his customary electric prose, Keevil cranks up the tension. You won't be able to look away.'
- Katherine Stansfield
This tense thriller is set in Eastern Europe but more particularly in the landscape of the human heart, exploring its darkness and depravity as well as its capacity for love. The excitement builds until it reaches a climax of almost mythic ferocity and power.
- Richard Francis
Keevil writes with startling clarity. In Your Still Beating Heart, he offers his reader a tightly plotted page turner, and, in his enviably precise style, reminds us just how precarious these lives of ours are and just how much we should value them. An exciting, intriguing, moving read.
- Rebecca F. John
Tyler Keevil has a phenomenal ability as a novelist to bring together a compelling cast of loners and eccentrics. While this is on the face of it a pacy thriller, Keevil has fashioned out of the genre a story about stories and storytelling which is both memorable and heart-rending.
- Francesca Rhydderch
This really grabbed me right from the start. I just couldn’t put it down. It’s unashamedly a pacy thriller. It's hard-hitting with a really strong political undercurrent… in places I wanted to look away but I couldn’t. It’s very, very strong.
- The Review Show, BBC Radio Wales
There’s a transcendent quality to novels which wrest tenderness and beauty from brutality and ugliness, and this one has it in abundance. Your Still Beating Heart has the emotional heft of a character-driven literary novel despite being a palpitation-inducing page-turner, a rare combination. I found it moving, gripping and evocative…
- Isabel Costello, The Literary Sofa
Tightly structured prose, tension and a vaguely threatening feel which seems to lurk in the background set Keevil’s novel in motion and make it very difficult to turn away, even during its most uncomfortable moments. What really stands out...is Keevil’s distinctive writing style and his ability to lead readers to question the choices they would make if they found themselves confronted with a situation such as the one Eira unwittingly finds herself in. This is a snappy and pacey read which makes for an excellent page-turner and a poignant reminder of the frailty of human life.
- Emma Schofield, Wales Arts Review
A phenomenal thriller… Every sentence was meticulously crafted and it left me in awe of the author and his ingenious storytelling… an extremely menacing and electrifying narrative… He perfectly builds the tension which leaves one feeling unsettled. I couldn't put it down. It was lingering in my mind for days.
- The Biblio Sara, Bookstagrammar
Keevil has crafted a finely-wrought, thoughtful thriller. Though it has bursts of riotous violence, its predominant atmosphere is a low hum of muted dread; and it presents no facile solutions to the knotted issues of love, motherhood and grief. It is a memorable evocation of the strange roads that loss can lead us down — and ultimately a moving parable of the vitalising power of human connection.
- Alex Diggins, New Welsh Review