Ebook
Published: Lightning Books (October 2018)
ISBN:
The Weight of a Human Heart
Ryan O'Neill
£4.99
Shortlisted: Scottish Book Awards
Shortlisted: Queensland Literary Awards
Shortlisted: New South Wales Premier's Literary Awards
A series of graphs illustrate the disintegration of a marriage, step by excruciating step. A literary brawl – and an affair – play out in the book review section of a national newspaper. A young girl learns her mother’s disturbing secrets through the broken key on a typewriter.
Sometimes comic, sometimes tragic, this collection by the award-winning author of Their Brilliant Careers turns the rules of storytelling on their head.
Ranging in setting from Australia to Africa to China and back again, The Weight of a Human Heart was the first published fiction by this remarkable Scottish writer based in Australia.
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‘The Weight of a Human Heart is refreshing, funny, devastating … O’Neill is a smart and daring writer; he challenges the conventions of short fiction, but his stories are still deeply satisfying and offer glimpses into worlds readers need to see, worlds that are vile, beautiful, and utterly human’
Megan Mayhew Bergman
‘Stories full of wit, irony, wild invention, love and pain – and sometimes shocking power’
Paddy O’Reilly
‘With each new story O’Neill redefines the boundaries of what is possible’
Patrick Cullen
‘The best first collection of stories you’re likely to read’
Wiley Cash
reviews
‘Daring, intelligent, witty, full of new discoveries and exhilarations’
‘Joyfully original… magnetic… a brilliant collection’
‘A book that delights in scuffing the conventions of short fiction… O’Neill brings playfulness into stories for a literate audience’
‘Full of verve and wit’
Canberra Times
‘Vital storytelling and literary flourishes distinguish Scottish author O’Neill’s creative story collection. What brings all of the tonal diversity together is his obvious understanding of the cohesiveness of language, its power to transcend and overcome, and the way an economy of precious words in a short story can achieve a novel’s worth of emotion’
‘In the hands of this able practitioner, the minor art form of the short story becomes major art’
Bookseller+Publisher
‘Sometimes comic, sometimes tragic, this collection by the award-winning author of Their Brilliant Careers turns the rules of storytelling on their head… Each story is a miniature masterpiece, perfectly formed like a clutch of eggs, each of which contains an entirely different inhabitant, only visible when the smooth, intact exterior is cracked by the reader’
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