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Critics' Opinion:
Readers' Opinion:
First Published:
Jul 2013, 240 pages
Paperback:
Jul 2014, 240 pages
Book Reviewed by:
Sarah Tomp
Buy This Book
With imagination, wit, and a keen eye, Ryan O'Neill draws the essence of the human experience with a cast of characters who stick with you long after you turn the last page of this brilliant short story collection.
Ranging from Australia and Africa to Europe and Asia and back again, The Weight of a Human Heart heralds a fresh and important new voice in fiction. Ryan O'Neill takes us on a journey that is sometimes comic, sometimes tragic, and wholly original.
A young Tutsi girl flees her village on the brink of the Rwandan genocide. A literary duel - 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.
With imagination, wit, and a keen eye, Ryan O'Neill draws the essence of the human experience with a cast of characters who stick with you long after you turn the last page of this brilliant short story collection.
Excerpt
Weight of a Human Heart
COLLECTED STORIES
Twelve Stories (Bearsden Press, 1966)
My mother, Margaret Hately, was a short-story writer. In the few photographs I have of her she is carrying a book, holding it against her chest as if she were suckling it. There are no photographs of my father. My mother destroyed them when he left her, a month before I was born. I only know him from the parts of him she put in her stories – a limp, a way of reading the newspaper at arm's length. Whilst my mother wrote, my father was made of words.
When I was a child, I loved to watch my mother writing. She would sit at her scarred wooden desk under the stained-glass window in the hallway, the sunlight harlequinning the paper before her. Even now I see the top third of any page in a book as green, the middle blue, and the lower third as yellow. As she wrote, she would keep a cigarette burning in the ashtray at her elbow, occasionally blowing great smoky O's into the air. ...
Innovative and provocative, The Weight of a Human Heart thoroughly explores what it means to be human—and to have a heart. This varied – and at times seemingly experimental – collection of short stories travels the wide world and brings readers inside the lives of many different characters...continued
Full Review
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(Reviewed by Sarah Tomp).
The Independent (UK)
Playful with content, O'Neill is also joyfully original with format ... [in] this brilliant collection. Cate Kennedy, author of Dark Roots
By turns acerbic, playful and serious, O'Neill is equally at home with satire and pathos.Ryan O'Neill was born in Glasgow in 1975. He lived in Africa, Europe and Asia before settling in Newcastle, Australia, with his wife and two daughters. His fiction has appeared in The Best Australian Stories, The Sleepers Almanac, Meanjin, New Australian Stories, Wet Ink, Etchings, and Westerly. His work has won the Hal Porter and Roland Robinson awards. The Weight of a Human Heart has been shortlisted for the 2012 Queensland Literary Prize—Steele Rudd Award. He teaches at the University of Newcastle.
What most appeals to you about the short story format?
One of the main things that appeals to me about short stories, as both a reader and a writer, is their variety. I love the fact that in a collection or anthology, one story...
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