Daily Books - The Art of Hearing Heartbeats: A Novel by Jan-Philipp Sendker | Conversation Starters

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Jan-Philipp Sendkers

The Art of Hearing Heartbeats

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Copyright 2015 by dailyBooks.All Rights Reserved.

First Published in the United States of America 2015

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T HE ART OF HEARING HEARTBEATS BY JAN-PHILIPP Sendker is a romance novel set in New York City and Burma in the 1950s through to the present day. The story begins when Julias father, Tin Win, a successful Wall Street lawyer, mysteriously disappears. Julia and her mother have no idea that he was leaving New York to reconnect with his first love in Thailand.

Four years after he disappears, Julia finds a love letter that her father had written to Mi Mi, a Burmese woman. Julia desperately wants to know what happened to her father, so she puts everything on hold and travels to Burma on a whim to find this mysterious Mi Mi. Her search for answers eventually leads her to Kalaw, a small town in Burma. While in Kalaw, an elderly man named U Ba shares her fathers story with her. Julia was shocked to learn that her father, whom she viewed as stable and predictable, had a life such as this before she was even born.

Much of the novel involves a narrative between Julia and U Ba. U Ba tells Julia the tale of Tin Win, from his adverse childhood through the time he fell in love with Mi Mi, and then how he came to leave Kalaw. U Ba told her that her father was abandoned by his parents as a young child because an astrologer had told his mother he was cursed and would lose his eyesight. When he was just ten years old, he began to lose his sight and eventually went blind, just as the astrologer had predicted. Julia also learned that her father ended up living in a monastery after he was abandoned by his mother. Tin Win spent several years studying under U May, the monastery abbot, who was a positive role model for him.

Tin Win met Mi Mi while living in the monastery, and like Tin Win, Mi Mi suffered from a disability, crippled feet. The two quickly bond as a result of feeling like outcasts and eventually fall in love. He becomes her legs, and she becomes his eyes; they are inseparable. Unfortunately, their relationship does not last long.

Tin Wins wealthy uncle agrees to pay for an operation to improve his eyesight as well as his education abroad but does so in a self-serving way, which in turn keeps Tin Win from communicating with Mi Mi, and they are thus separated for decades, until now...

Tin Win and Mi Mi believe in each other and the love they have, even over the miles and decades that separate them. Their unconditional love for each other will pull you in from start to finish.

I NTERNATIONALLY KNOWN BEST-SELLING AUTHOR Jan-Philipp Sendker was born in 1960 in Hamburg, Germany and currently resides in Berlin with his family. Sendker is best known for his fiction including The Art of Hearing Heartbeats (2012 debut novel) , A Well-Tempered Heart (2014 sequel to his debut novel), and Whispering Shadows (2015 his most recent novel). He has also written a non-fiction book about China called Cracks in the Great Wall.

Sendker was a foreign correspondent for Stern magazine , a weekly news magazine based in Hamburg, Germany, which gave him the opportunity to travel to many different places, where he learned about different people and their cultures. He was the American correspondent from 1990-1995 and the Asian correspondent from 1995-1999. As a reporter, he found himself in places around the world he could never have imagined going, from a slum in Haiti to a wealthy villa in Las Vegas to a small village in Myanmar.

Sendker is an avid reader of American and English authors. According to his website, he admires their storytelling, and he enjoys reading work from other cultures. Although he is a German author himself, Sendker admits that he is not a fan of German literature.

One of the things that Jan-Philipp Sendker says he loves about writing is that things seem to come out of nowhere. For instance, while he was writing The Art of Hearing Heartbeats, his memories, including the sights and sounds, from his trips to Myanmar seemed to come back to him.

According to his website, Sendker is currently working on a trilogy series that takes place in China. His inspiration came from the time he spent in China as a correspondent. He is fascinated by its power, politics, and culture. The first two novels have already been published in Europe, and the third is in process.

Author Jan-Philipp Sendker got the idea to write The Art of Hearing Heartbeats after a trip to Myanmar. What are some of the setting details in the book that demonstrate the influence Myanmar had on the author?