Patrick Healy’s recently published novel Beyond the Pale is a work of rare literary daring and imaginative scope. It is a book that resists simple categorisation, weaving together memoir, myth, folklore, philosophy, and social history into a luminous meditation on memory, language, and place.
Berlin 1912: the city is restless, electric, drunk on new art. At the Café des Westens, amid smoke, laughter, and arguments, Else Lasker-Schüler sketches her lovers, invents her alter egos, and writes the book that will become her most intimate performance. My Heart is less a novella than a love letter shattered into shards—half diary, half masque—where betrayal is staged as theatre and longing reimagined as myth.