A contemporary fable of existential melancholia, The Failing Heart is a dark, surreal story set in Dublin.

Haunted by the death of his mother and the impending birth of his ex-lover's child, a student embarks on an obsessive quest for knowledge. Abandoning his home, running out of money and increasingly paranoid, the people he encounters and the places he inhabits become mysterious sources of terror and anxiety. Everywhere there are intimations of a world that demands to be known, and yet refuses to yield up its secrets.

‘…part escape into another consciousness, part suffocating delusion…self-aware and wry, with rare flashes of humour amid a claustrophobic search for meaning and desire to confess…at the end of this brief novel there is the sensation of having witnessed the dark dream of a stranger.’ (The Irish Times)

‘Brilliant! Dark and atmospheric. It's a compulsive account of how it feels to be tortured and mired in anxiety’. (Irish Examiner)

‘Dublin [is] a strange, nebulous city, unfixed in time and place that seems barely tethered to its real-world locus…there is something about its oddness, its dirty, smelly, sticky ungraspability that, well, sticks.' (Black Static)

‘Strangely mesmeric…Eoghan Smith is a stylist, and the lyricism of this narrative lifts the general air of gloom. I loved it!' (Books Ireland)

‘Haunting, bleak, horrifying and darkly comedic…I devoured every single word of this truly exquisite debut.’ (Waterford News & Star)

‘…touch[es] upon the broader philosophical questions that plague life itself…[The Failing Heart] is for those fascinated by the macabre, the grotesque or the noir, sprinkled with dark humour.’ (Dublin Inquirer)

The Failing Heart is published by Dedalus Books (2018)