Drawing powerfully from his own brush with mortality, author Patrick Charnley delivers an astonishing and moving debut novel in This, My Second Life. The story follows a young man's fragile recovery in a remote Cornish village, crafting a narrative that is both spare and intensely beautiful.
A Life Shattered and Rebuilt
The novel's narrator, 20-year-old Jago Trevarno, has retreated to the Cornish coast after a catastrophic cardiac arrest left him clinically dead for 40 minutes. With his mother lost to cancer and his father absent, Jago shelters with his taciturn, off-grid uncle, Jacob. The life he had begun to build in the city has evaporated. Now, on a subsistence farm high above the Atlantic, his world has shrunk to the elemental rhythms of weather, animals, and daylight.
Charnley, the son of the late, celebrated writer Helen Dunmore, also experienced cardiac arrest and brain injury, and lost his mother to cancer young. Yet this novel transcends mere autobiography. Jago's brain operates with "reduced processing power," forcing a slow, deliberate existence. He lives in marked retreat from intense emotion, fearing the havoc it could wreak on his vulnerable state. This circumscribed life is perfect for initial healing, but soon poses a profound question: can he hide from the past and the outside world forever?
The Outside World Intrudes
Inevitably, the outside world presses in on Jago's fragile sanctuary. On the benign side is Granny Carne, a fiercely independent local seer and keeper of secrets. More destabilising is the return of Sophie, Jago's first love, whom he abandoned in the turbulent wake of his mother's death. Her presence threatens his hard-won emotional stability.
The most significant threat, however, comes from Bill Sligo, a notorious neighbour whose land borders Jacob's. Sligo covets a field containing an old mineshaft, and his determination to acquire it suggests he will stop at nothing. Faced with this aggression, Jago must make a critical choice: retreat further or find the strength to engage.
A Prose of Piercing Intensity
The power of This, My Second Life lies in its exquisite, poetic prose. Charnley builds a hypnotic rhythm from the simple, immediate details of Jago's days: the smell of a library, the shifting colours of the sea, the taste of plain food. This creates a luminous quality, electric with Jago's delight in a world he fears could be snatched away again.
As Jago meticulously navigates his limitations, his distinctive voice emerges—true, clear, and entirely convincing. The narrative is a profound meditation on recovery, trauma, and the slow, piece-by-piece reconstruction of a self. It is published by Hutchinson Heinemann at £16.99.
Charnley has not just written a novel about survival; he has crafted a work of art that makes the world feel new, reminding us of the fragile, precious nature of life itself.
