Drawing from the depths of a profound personal trauma, 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 illuminated by the author's own brush with mortality.
A Life Shattered and Rebuilt
The novel's protagonist, twenty-year-old Jago Trevarno, retreats to Cornwall after a cardiac arrest leaves him clinically dead for forty minutes. With his mother dead from cancer and his father absent, Jago seeks shelter with his reclusive, off-grid uncle, Jacob. His previous life in the city, described as a "runaway train" from grief, has evaporated. Now, with brain injuries causing "reduced processing power," Jago must live with deliberate slowness, his days defined by the raw labour of subsistence farming high on the Atlantic coast.
This existence of extreme simplicity, governed by weather, animals, and daylight, forms a protective cocoon. Jago, wary of intense emotion for fear of damaging his healing synapses, finds a quiet companion in his taciturn uncle. Yet, as his health gradually improves, a pressing question emerges: can he remain in this suspended state, hiding from his past and the wider world indefinitely?
The Outside World Intrudes
Isolation, however, is never absolute. The outside world soon presses in on Jago's fragile peace. On one side is the benign force of 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 turmoil following his mother's death. Her reappearance stirs a raft of painful feelings that threaten his hard-won emotional stability.
The most direct threat 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 is forced to choose between continued retreat or finally engaging with a conflict that could destroy his second chance at life.
A Prose Poem of Convalescence
Charnley, the son of the late acclaimed writer Helen Dunmore, prefaces the book with a note on his own experiences of cardiac arrest and brain injury. While drawing from personal loss, the novel transcends mere trauma narrative. The prose is spare, beautiful, and finely wrought. It captures the hypnotic rhythm of a life reduced to essentials: the smell of a library, the shifting colours of the sea, the savour of plain food.
Jago's distinctive narrative voice is a true creation—clear, convincing, and constantly reaching for light. The writing luminously conveys his delight in a world made new, yet remains electric with the fear that it could be snatched away at any moment. It is a piercing study of meticulous recovery, where the building blocks of a self are patiently gathered and reassembled.
'This, My Second Life' by Patrick Charnley is published by Hutchinson Heinemann priced at £16.99. It stands as a remarkable and poetic exploration of survival, memory, and the slow, brave work of coming back to life.
