*Currently reading* status update -

Yeah, I'm reading a Maeve Binchy novel, what of it?! Seriously, why do I have this guilty/embarrassed feeling like the time when my mom caught me looking at the lingerie section in the Sears catalogue?

*Read* review -

After hearing an author's name mentioned on the radio and seeing it pop up at shops and the library, there comes a point when I bow down to the coincidences of the world that are "telling me something" and finally read something by that author. Coup More...

Wonderful! Wonderful! Reading this was like falling into a warm and cozy bath with great chocolate to eat. Some characters from previous books make appearances and even have greater parts in this novel. I am so glad I ordered it early from Amazon U.K. This novel centers around a heart clinic and the people who work there and the patients who go there as well for treatment. The usual blend of small mysteries and entertwined lives as only Maeve Binchy could do.This was definitely worth the wait!On More...

Ugh... this was a SLLLLOOWWWWW read. It's not my favorite Binchy book by any stretch of the imagination. I know some of the characters have been recycled from other books, but I can't remember which books, so that's a little frustrating. I wish there was a cheat sheet somewhere to jog my memory about who they are.

I love Maeve Binchy and this is another charming character driven story. I love the way she brings back characters from previous novels for cameo appearances, like an old friend stopping by to say hello. If you're looking for a gentle and enjoyable read this is a great choice.

For more than twenty years, Maeve Binchy has been an auto-read for me. (And I think I've even shelled out for a hardcover or two). I loved her earlier books filled with tales of small Irish towns, petty, and not so petty grievances, and wonderfully complicated relationships. In 1996, however, with the book, Evening Class, I felt Ms. Binchy had made a left turn in her writing. Instead of writing novels, it seemed her books were more like short story collections. And with Whitethorn Woods, and thi More...

Maeve Binchy é hoje uma das autoras mais lidas nos Estados Unidos e na Grã-Bretanha. Nas livrarias, seus livros estão sempre em destaque nas vitrines e nas estantes. Com Coração e Alma, os leitores brasileiros vão conhecer esse fenômeno editorial que há anos encanta pessoas ao redor do planeta.

Clara Casey está cheia de problemas. Suas filhas, Adi e Linda, nunca lhe deram trabalho durante os anos tumultuados da adolescência. Porém, com vinte e poucos anos, Adi está sempre lutando a favor de algum More...

One of my all-time favorite authors, Maeve Binchey, does it again with a novel that lets me completely escape into someone else's life for a while. I've been reading Binchey for a long time now, and I love what her novels have evolved to. She used to write the huge, coming-of-age novels. I loved them. And while they always ended well, with closure, I always wonder what happened to these characters I had grown to love so much. I don't have enough curiosity about them to wish for a sequel, rather More...

No single book of Maeve Binchy's stands out as central. In fact, this one seems more like a series of episodes in the long-running soap opera of which Binchy herself seems to play the role of Author, beamingly from the back flap of every cover. If a soap opera can be characterized as having no plot, only multiple sub-plots, having a huge array of characters who inhabit a common world in which their paths cross and re-cross, and if the ambience, the flavor of this world, is really the chief attra More...

Audio book read by Sile Bermingham.

This is a story of family, friends, patients and staff whose lives intersect at a heart clinic in Dublin. Dr Clara Casey has taken on the job of director of this underfunded but much needed clinic. She agrees to a one-year contract because she has plenty of other issues in her personal life – two adult daughters with whom she has a difficult relationship, and an ex-husband who is trying to worm his way back into her good graces. The staff she assembles is eclec More...

New author! Well, to me she is. I have seen books from Binchy all over the place, but I just never picked one up. And now I can see why. As a whole, I am so not a fan of Irish authors. I think it's mainly to do with the characters. They live a more simple life there that I just don't get and the women are always so pushed around and they just take it! It's just a society that I don't get. One good thing about her books is that they are big and while they are really quick reads, they still take a More...

I enjoyed this book, but it definitely wasn't among Binchy's best works. Like her previous book, Whitethorn Woods, this novel is a series of vignettes around one central location, in this case a clinic. Some of the characters have appeared in previous works, including Whitethorn Woods, Quentin's, Evening Class, The Scarlet Feather, and Nights of Rain and Stars, but you probably don't have to read the previous books to keep up with this. My issue with Heart and Soul is that there isn't any centra More...

Frank Ennis had a marvelous plan for the unused storage building owned by St. Brigid's Hospital in Dublin. He had found buyers for it who would build a block of housing. It was a great way get rid of a neighborhood eyesore, and he'd get the credit for adding all that money to St. Brigid's coffers.

However, his fellow board members voted his great plan down and decided to turn it into a heart clinic instead. They wanted a day clinic where patients would come to exercise, learn to change their die More...

My wifi has been acting up, so this is my third try at this.

A gentle woman's read. Binchy's stories always turn out well, like a fairy tale, which I have a sneaking fondness for.

This one is about the formation and first year of a Heart Clinic, formed to help people who have had heart attacks get follow up care in a non hospital setting. Most of the characters are sympathetic types. Even the bad ones come to sort of a resolution in the end. There's a women who is the head of the clinic; a hospit More...

I usually try to broaden my literature tastes by trying about one more romantic than mystery type of book a year. This one I thought my friend will love, but before passing it to her, I tried it, as maybe one day, you know, one will end up finding something new of a different category that is actually enjoyable. And this was such.

I'm surprised I liked the book. Or maybe I now understand why I don't like most of the female love adventure books: they are most of the time written as an upper middle More...

I enjoy books with strong sense of place. I love to travel, and read while I travel, so many of my memories of good books are also tied to the places where I read them. For me, Julia Glass inspires thoughts of Italy while C.J. Box makes me think of Colorado. Recently I listened to Maeve Binchy’s newest book, Heart and Soul, while traveling in the Ozark Mountains. Heart and Soul is set in both Dublin and Poland and Binchy creates a strong sense of place within the story. Binchy is known for her g More...

Whitethorn Woods was a huge disappointment to me so I wasn't sure if this book was going to end up the same but I loved it and felt that this was more like the old Binchy that I loved.

Back Cover Blurb:
Clara Casey has more than enough on her plate. Her daughters Adi and Linda were no problem during the usually turbulent teens. Now Adi is always fighting for or against something: the environment or the whale or battery farming; while Linda lurches from one unsatisfactory relationship to the next. More...

My Mum handed me this book after she had read it and as a fan of past Binchey books I thought I'd give it a try. What these books always guarantee is an easy read (especially more so in her more most recent ones) but this is always not such a good thing. What I enjoyed about her older books (The Glass Lake and the The Italian Class being particular examples) was the richness in family and friend relationships and the ramifications which they had over future generations. Although Heart and Soul w More...

It’s difficult to say anything negative about Maeve Binchy books. How can one fault books that are as warm and comfortable as a big fluffy blanket? True, there are some that are definitely better than others, some characters you care about more than others, but when all is said and done you always come away from reading a Binchy book appreciating the humor, compassion and Irish spirit that permeates each page.

In HEART AND SOUL, Binchy utilizes an underfunded heart clinic as the focal point for t More...

Actually a 3.5 star- I would give it a 4 if there had been more tie in with the stories developed in other novels.
The book tells the story of the various people working in the new village Heart clinic.Many of the characters they interact with have been seen in other Binchy stories. However, little is done to tell the reader of their histories. The book is really interesting if the reader has had the good luck of reading after the prior novels but would be more confusing without the background t More...

Heart and Soul is a new paperback by Maeve Binchy. It is published by Orion and its ISBN is 1409102319. Maeve Binchy is my favourite author so my expectations were very high and I was not disappointed. She makes something complex look very easy and that is her great skill and strength. She writes of ordinary people with ordinary problems in a compassionate and easy to read fashion. Somehow their lives interweave to make the tale complete. Occasionally she reintroduces old characters into her nov More...

I had heard years ago that Maeve Binchy was going to retire and not write anymore. Apparently retirement wasn't all it's cracked up to be because since that time she's written about 4 or 5 more books. Heart and Soul was slow to grab my attention but like all Binchy books, before you know it you are sucked into the lives of the characters and you just have to keep on reading. Binchy is the master of tying in characters from other books and Heart and Soul is a prime example of this. There are char More...

I would not have picked this book to read on my own. It was the book choice for my Ladies' Book Group. I thought the book, about a woman who gets a position heading a heart clinic in Dublin, was much too saccharine. Clara, the main, well mostly main character, since there are myriad characters, comes into the clinic and has everything quickly fall into place for her. She quickly finds great, friendly, efficient (that is, perfect)staff within a couple of days. They all have their own side stories More...

This was great story of a Heart clinic that turned a community of workers, skilled professionals, and the patients into a family. They worked together to support, protect and love each other. The book took you into each of ghe characters' lives so you know what they each are feeling and thinking. Clara is woman with two adult daughters that is seperated from her cheating husband. She was hired to start it up and run the clinic for a year. She is terrible disappointed that she was passed up for a More...

I recieved this book from my mother a few months back; she thought I'd enjoy a light read about Dublin.

The book is set in a newly formed heart clinic, St. Brigid's, designed to battle the ever increasing problem caused by the "Irish diet", which mainly consists of fried meats and an over abundance of starches. Dr. Clara Casey, a fiesty woman in her early 50s, has been hired to set up and run the new facility. Much of the book deals with how she has gone about selecting her staff and the interac More...

I've read many of Maeve Binchy's stories; they are very readable, breezy in style. I bought this particular edition - her last, I think - at the library book sale last summer and didn't think to pick it up for reading until I heard that Maeve Binchy died last month.

I read Maeve Binchy for several things, mostly the sound of Irish voices in my ear. This book, and all her books, are gossipy, soap operaish and glib. Even saying that, they are well-written, not boring, and fun to live in for awhile More...

(copied review) Dr. Clara Casey has been offered the thankless job of establishing the underfunded clinic and agrees to take it on for a year. She has plenty on her plate already—two difficult adult daughters and the unwanted attentions of her exhusband—but she assembles a wonderfully diverse staff devoted to helping their demanding, often difficult patients: the infectiously cheerful nurse; the indispensable office manager who can’t quite manage her own life; the Polish girl who’s come to Irela More...

This book is best read before Minding Frankie, sequel to Heart and Soul, but either can stand alone. Disparate characters, family love, and family dysfunction all contribute to sweet stories of budding romance and/or getting on with life. I really enjoyed the two women friends who plot to get their respective son and daughter to meet and fall in love, having convinced themselves that their offspring would be perfect together. It works, of course, because who knows better than the parent what is More...

Dr. Clara Casey accepts the job of establishing an underfunded heart clinic for a year. Right away she is able to assemble the perfect staff for the job (which I found highly unbelievable, but it would be cool if you only had to interview a couple of people for a position and after that everyone work together perfectly). Together they combat their money grubbing superior and work to make the clinic a huge success.

One of the things I love about Mave Binchy is the time she spends giving each char More...

This is my second outing in a Maeve Binchy novel and I have enjoyed it every bit as much as my first exposure to this writer’s offerings. Ms. Binchy is Irish and many if not all of her best-selling novels are based on the folks she has lived amongst all of her life. She brings to her writing an adept skill at handling multiple story lines with considerable ease.

Dr. Clara Casey is a somewhat renowned cardiologist who has been asked to head up an outpatient clinic for patients with heart disease More...

In Maeve Binchy’s “Heart and Soul,” we are immediately welcomed into a circle of warmth and comfort, as we are introduced to each character in this small “heart clinic” in Dublin, Ireland. Adjacent to the hospital, this newly created clinic offers after-care to heart patients—care with a very personal touch. Dr. Clara Casey heads up the clinic, but is known to all as “Clara.” This informality and the personal touch both irritate and gall the “money man” from the hospital side (Frank Ennis), who More...