Drawing on the profound trauma of his own cardiac arrest, author Patrick Charnley has crafted an astonishing and moving debut novel. This, My Second Life tells the story of a young man's fragile recovery in a remote Cornish village, a narrative luminous with the sheer wonder of being alive.
A Life Reassembled Piece by Piece
Following a cardiac arrest that left him clinically dead for 40 minutes, the novel's narrator, twenty-year-old Jago Trevarno, retreats from the city. He returns to the Cornish village of his childhood, seeking shelter with his taciturn, off-grid uncle, Jacob. With his mother dead from cancer and his father absent, Jago's world has shrunk to the hard, simple labour of a subsistence farm high on the rugged Atlantic coast.
The life he had begun to build—a frantic escape from grief—has evaporated. His brain injury has left him with "reduced processing power", forcing a slow, deliberate pace. He exists in a state of extreme emotional caution, wary of any upheaval that could damage his vulnerable recovery. In this stark, weather-governed existence with Jacob, Jago begins the meticulous work of rebuilding himself from the wreckage.
The Outside World Intrudes
While this circumscribed life is perfect for initial healing, it cannot remain a permanent stasis. The outside world, in the form of neighbours both benign and threatening, begins to impinge. On one side is the fiercely independent Granny Carne, a village seer and keeper of secrets. More destabilising is the return of Sophie, Jago's first love, who he abandoned in the turbulent wake of his mother's death. Her presence threatens his precarious emotional balance.
The most significant danger, however, comes from Bill Sligo, a notorious local whose land borders Jacob's. Sligo covets a field containing an old mineshaft, and his ruthless ambition forces Jago to a critical decision: to retreat further or to finally engage with the world he has fled.
A Prose of Piercing Intensity
Though prefaced with a note on Charnley's own experience of cardiac arrest and brain injury—and his personal loss of his mother, the late writer Helen Dunmore—to view the novel merely as trauma transcription would be a disservice. The prose is spare, beautiful, and finely wrought.
Charnley builds a hypnotic rhythm from the immediate sensations of Jago's world: the smell of a library, the colours of the sea, the taste of plain food. This creates a piercing intensity, rendering the world new and electric with the fear it might be snatched away again. Jago's distinctive, convincing voice, always reaching for light and life, is the book's great achievement.
This, My Second Life by Patrick Charnley is published by Hutchinson Heinemann at £16.99. It is an extraordinary debut that charts the fragile, wondrous process of coming back to life.
