Serpent's Tail Classics The Course of Heart

The strange edges of reality are explored in M John Harrison’s extraordinary cult classic, now with an introduction by bestselling author Julia Armfield. This novel follows a group of Cambridge students whose ritual on a hot May night changes their lives forever. Decades later, memories blur and the participants are bound by what they cannot fully recall. Pam Stuyvesant battles epilepsy and is haunted by sensual visions, while her husband Lucas fears a dwarfish creature stalking him and argues histories to ease Pam’s fears. A self-styled Sorcerer named Yaxley becomes obsessed with a transcendent reality that defies easy explanation. The unnamed narrator appears least affected, yet is haunted by the smell of roses and the guilt of trying to help his friends escape the torment that has gripped them. The Course of the Heart is a spare, dreamlike examination of the edges of humanity—where we lie, hide, hurt and heal.

Its reception has highlighted the work as a groundbreaking, intelligent exploration of memory, perception and desire, earning praise as a spare yet closure-denying achievement. The novel is praised for its elegant prose and its capacity to linger in the mind, inviting readers to consider how deeply memory and reality can diverge.

• M John Harrison, cult classic novel
• Introduction by Julia Armfield
• Cambridge setting, ritual, memory, guilt
• Pam Stuyvesant, epilepsy, sensual visions
• Lucas’s fear of a dwarfish stalker
• Yaxley, the sorcerer obsessed with reality
• 288 pages, paperback edition
• Publisher: Profile Books Ltd

• The Course of the Heart is a spare, dreamlike literary fiction
• Narrator guides through tangled memories and moral tension
• Themes: edges of humanity, memory, perception, healing