'A high-velocity read opening veins of radiant darkness. Royle's dream-tracks honour territory previously mapped by such masters as JG Ballard and M John Harrison. He sustains his metaphor with heart-stopping guile'


'Nicholas Royle combines dreamtime with A-Z. Every back street, every corner in the rain, every corridor of an abandoned hospital has his sign on it, hacked into the tangled urban undergrowth with the machete of real talent'


'Dizzy, scary, crazily learned stuff'

'A breakthrough book... satisfying and surprising... powerfully imagined...The book sets out its influences like blue plaques, drawing on the psychic map-making practised by Iain Sinclair and M John Harrison... By foregrounding such influences, he is able to stake out his own space and establish himself as a writer on a level with his models rather than "in the tradition" of them. The project of this novel is not so much to make sense of the many aspects of the word "heart" as to reveal the wondrously intricate and interdependent components of a muscle, a city and a complex psychogeography'

'Just what the doctor of philosophy ordered... Royle uses [science's] vernacular to counterbalance the endearing colloquial style of his narration, and sucks every last drop out of the streets-as-veins metaphor'

'Hard-edged, new British fiction... Royle's prose is really pumping... There's a pop collage feel to the impressive range of styles that float along the way: Iain Sinclair psychogeographic incantation meets Jeremy Clarkson auto-porn on the Australian highway; This Life dialogue abuts with scenarios self-consciously borrowed from George Sluizer's original film of The Vanishing... Such a range of Absolutely Zeitgeist references, whether consciously satirical or not, is only to be admired and enjoyed. What Royle has in common with Sinclair (and Jonathan Coe) is that his novel is cineliterate... The new British fiction is marked by the cinema as profoundly as Graham Greene's, and is all the better for it'

'Royle's novel unravels the dark history of one charged room in a curiously compelling and mysterious journey into the labyrinthine workings of the heart. From the 19th-century doctor performing insane heart-swapping operations to an illicit coupling 150 years later, Royle leads the reader deeper into a powerful, mesmeric story which threatens to expose the tiny timebomb ticking away in our chests'

'Like Iain Sinclair, Royle sees London as a palimpsest; if you scratch away at the surface, traces of earlier lives of the city and its inhabitants are revealed. The city's roads are "emotional routes", like veins and arteries carrying the blood of personal histories to and from the heart. Thus, even when the novel switches to Western Australia and then Dartmoor, all roads lead back to London and St George's'

'In his prose he mines a fertile seam that runs from structural experiment through to a sly and subtle respect for the tried and tested practices of established literary models'

'Takes favourite Royle concerns (psychogeometric correspondences; figures from different countries, cultures and classes locked in alignment; the superiority of Pizza Express pizzas) and maps them on to a narrative which, in its colloquial ease and careful plotting, is closer in spirit to Jonathan Coe and Peter Ackroyd than Anna Kavan, whose drug-blanched dreamscapes informed Royle's earlier Saxophone Dreams'

'Ambitious, multilayered work... rich in contemporary social observation, very good on the texture of London life, and most humorous in parts, too'

'Royle obviously knows London like the back of a cab driver's hand and the thrill of a car-nut's fluid cruises around familiar streets is seductive... This is a collage of a novel, for it weaves mystery and a touch of 19th-century melodrama with travelogue and road movie hysterics. All of these are juggled with an engaging lightness of touch, which makes the labyrinthine plot both entertaining and an effective disguise for the emotional odyssey of its narrator'

'Unidentifiable yet textual, a singular effect of that "originary technics" Derrida also calls "writing", the heart is a crypt. Royle's novel, no doubt in some ways in spite of itself, beats to the rhythm of this cryptic heart: realistic, surrealistic, parodic, postmodern gothic, The Matter of the Heart is also something different. In its engagement with and by the heart (the heart as at once mechanical and affective, cryptic and textual), in its engagement with a thinking of the genre of the novel that exposes this heart to the arresting, fatal and revivifying effects of the telephonic and telepathic, deafness and unreadability, The Matter of the Heart signals towards a thinking of cardiogrammatology. As an example of what the narrator at one point refers to as "an experiment in psychogeography" (287), Royle's novel makes my heart bleed. My heart is buried here, in Nicholas Royle's fiction, inseparable from my name which is not mine, my heart that is not mine, that is in turn inseparable from the automaton, technological in its essence'