The beginning of Neil Bissoondath’s Doing the Heart Good marks the end of a seventy-year-old man’s independent life. Alistair Mackenzie — widower, father, grandfather, retired professor, lover of Dickens and good sherry — is forced to move in with his daughter and her family, bringing with him only a few medals, pyjamas that still bear the smell of smoke, and memory — that territory, alien and untrustworthy, unfailingly inhabited by a familiar stranger.

Seeking to come to terms with a life he has never anticipated, fearful of disappearing after his death, he examines significant episodes from his shattered past, revisiting a lifetime of love and quarrels, friendship and betrayal, war and peace. As he performs that strange and wonderful dance of moving forward while also looking back, the past begins to lend coherence to the confused present and to reveal the thread that connects him to his new future with his daughter, his son-in-law, and his grandson. A sedentary man quietly living out the final years of life, Alistair Mackenzie must learn how to adapt to his place in time — and how not to let the rest of his life pass him by, his family become strangers, his achievements be forgotten.

A novel of memory — of what it means, how it informs, how it can salvage tomorrow from the debris of yesterday — written at the very height of a great artist’s power.

Neil Bissoondath is the author of two short story collections, Digging Up the Mountains and On The Eve Of Uncertain Tomorrows, and five novels, A Casual Brutality, The Innocence of Age, Doing the Heart Good, The Unyielding Clamour of Night, and The Soul of All Great Designs. His fiction has been nominated for many prizes, including The Guardian Fiction Prize, the Smithbooks/Books in Canada First Novel Award, and the Governor General’s Literary Award. He has twice won the Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction and once won the Canadian Authors Association Prize for Fiction. His non-fiction book, Selling Illusions: The Cult of Multiculturalism in Canada (1994) won the Gordon Montador Award.

Originally from Trinidad, Neil now lives in Quebec City with his wife and daughter. He is a professor in the Département des literatures at Université Laval.  

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• Winner, Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction

“Bissoondath is acclaimed for his eloquent prose and this book is no exception.”

The Star Phoenix

“I wanted to start it again the moment I got to the end. It truly does do the heart good.”

Books in Canada

“A satisfying, old-fashioned read filled with social commentary, physical comedy and Alistair’s memories of unforgettable people.”

Montreal Gazette

“The attention to character and narrative imagination are truly astonishing. Each anecdote could, in another writer’s hands, have been an entire novel; the condensation here lends Doing the Heart Good an impressive richness.”

Vancouver Sun