The beginning of Neil Bissoondath’s Doing the Heart Good marks the end of a seventy-year-old man’s independent life. Alistair Mackenzie — widower, father, grandfather, retired professor, lover of Dickens and good sherry — is forced to move in with his daughter and her family, bringing with him only a few medals, pyjamas that still bear the smell of smoke, and memory — that territory, alien and untrustworthy, unfailingly inhabited by a familiar stranger. Seeking to come to ter