Your Heart Is a Muscle the Size of a Fist

De: Sunil Yapa

Narrado por: Aaron Landon

This electrifying novel from an award-winning author follows a grieving father and son as they find themselves on opposite sides of a protest during an important moment in history.

Grief-stricken after his mother's death and three years of wandering the world, Victor is longing for a family and a sense of purpose. He believes he's found both when he returns home to Seattle only to be swept up in a massive protest. With young, biracial Victor on one side of the barricades and his estranged father—the white chief of police—on the opposite, the day descends into chaos, capturing in its confusion the activists, police, bystanders, and citizens from all around the world who'd arrived that day brimming with hope. By the day's end, they have all committed acts they never thought possible.

As heartbreaking as it is pulse-pounding, Yapa's virtuosic debut asks profound questions about the power of empathy in our hyper-connected modern world, and the limits of compassion, all while exploring how far we must go for family, for justice, and for love.

Reseñas de la Crítica

"A fantastic debut novel.... What is so enthralling about this novel is its syncopated riff of empathy as the perspective jumps around these participants--some peaceful, some violent, some determined, some incredulous... Yapa creates a fluid sense of the riot as it washes over the city. Your Heart is a Muscle the Size of a Fist ultimately does for WTO protests what Norman Mailer's Armies of the Night did for the 1967 March on the Pentagon, gathering that confrontation in competing visions of what happened and what it meant."--Ron Charles, Washington Post

"A symphony of a novel. Sunil Yapa inhabits the skins of characters vastly different to himself: a riot cop in Seattle, a punk activist, a disillusioned world traveler and a high-level diplomat, among others. Through it all Yapa showcases a raw and rare talent. This is a protest novel which finds, at its core, a deep and abiding regard for the music of what happens. In the contemporary tradition of Aleksandar Hemon and Phillipp Meyer, with echoes of Michael Ondaatje and Arundhati Roy, Yapa strives forward with a literary molotov cocktail to light up the dark."--Colum McCann, author of the National Book Award winner Let the Great World Spin

"Your Heart is a Muscle the Size of a Fist is visceral, horrifying, and often heroic. But above all, this book is a full-throated chorus of voices on all sides--protestors, cops, delegates, politicians, and ramblers--as democracy runs headlong into the machinery of global power. Sunil Yapa has achieved something special, a story that is as tragic as it is relevant, as unflinching as it is humane."
—Smith Henderson, author of Fourth of July Creek

"Your Heart is a Muscle the Size of a Fist is a stunningly orchestrated, symphonic work of narrative power. This novel marshals all the vital forces of our existence--from the domestic to the political--and offers them to the reader with equal doses of compassion and beauty."—Dinaw Mengestu, author of All Our Names

"There is nothing to say about Sunil Yapa's debut novel that its wonderful title doesn't already promise--its heart beats and bleeds on every page, in prose so raw it feels built of muscle and tissue and sinew and sweat. This book is delightfully, forcefully alive, and I feel more alive for having read it."—Eleanor Henderson, author of Ten Thousand Saints

"An open-armed love letter to humanity, this glorious novel loops around a burning center encompassing the warmth of parents and the coolness of patriarchy. Your Heart is a Muscle the Size of a Fist will compel you to look and then to witness. 'We are mad with hope' the narrator says early on, and by the end the reader is too."—Tiphanie Yanique, author of Land of Love and Drowning

Interestingly crossed character stories

Hard for me to start with characters that you want to predict, but the last ~5 chapters were a work of art, supported by the entire beginning. Very deep stuff

some merit in between bigger problems

In full disclosure I don't like Yapa's prose. while he did bring the Seattle Protests to like he did it in between unrealistic dialog.

Your Heart IS a Muscle

So many feels. I couldn't stop listening. It is very well written. A must read.

Impressive imagery

While listening to this book, it was easy for me to imagine the screens unfolding and even made me a little angry at times due to the description of how the protestors were treated.

Although the book started a little slow, I think it offers a good look into people hearts and how they fight personal battles every day and how a single decision or action can change a person’s life forever.

if you can withstand your emotional reactions...

Difficult to get through because of the intense violence and hate which is the core of the story, but worth every moment if you can get to the end.