Why read Sick Heart River?

Book cover of Sick Heart River

Book description

Sir Edward Leithen - perhaps the autobiographical of Buchan's characters - is dying of tuberculosis and has been given a year to live. After this prognosis, Leithen undertakes a profoundly heroic quest from London to the Canadian Northwest, tracking down a missing man who is literally 'sick at heart'. In…

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Why read it?

1 author picked Sick Heart River as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Helen Nicholson

Author

This is a sad book in that the central character dies at the end; the knowledge that this death is inevitable tinges the whole story with melancholy.

Yet it is also a story of hope, of joy in the beauty of nature, and of human endeavour and determination in the face of one of the Earth’s great, inaccessible, wild places.

The story is told so skilfully that the reader forgets she is reading and feels as if she herself is experiencing the story; and Buchan’s compelling descriptions of the landscape of north-west Canada – vast forests, powerful rivers, its local…

From Helen's 3 favorite reads in 2023.