The Failing Heart is a dark, surreal tale set in Dublin. Haunted by the death of his mother and the impending birth of his ex-lover’s child, a student embarks on an obsessive quest for knowledge. Abandoning his home, running out of money and increasingly paranoid, the people he encounters and the places he inhabits become mysterious sources of terror and anxiety. Everywhere there are intimations of a world that demands to be known, and yet refuses to yield up its secrets. A contemporary fable of existential melancholia, The Failing Heart plunges the reader into the psyche of a tortured individual who is compelled to live a life beyond human comprehension. AUTHOR: Eoghan Smith is an Irish writer, critic and academic. He completed a PhD at Maynooth University, and has taught English literature at universities and colleges in Dublin, Maynooth and Carlow since the mid-2000s. He is the author of a full length study of the novels of John Banville, and the co-editor of a collection of essays on Irish suburban literary and visual cultures. He has contributed numerous essays, articles and reviews on literature and visual culture to a variety of academic and literary publications. The Failing Heart is his first novel.