The Weight of Loss

Reviews / Votes

'It's hard to believe The Weight of Loss by Sally Oliver is a debut novel because the writing and pacing are so confident and assured. Compulsive and deeply unsettling. Don't start it if you have stuff to do!' -- Clare Chambers, author of Small Pleasures 'I love Sally Oliver's writing... I found the whole thing addictive.' -- Helen Fisher, author of Space Hopper 'Daring, unsettling and original, The Weight of Loss is a debut to savour. Sally Oliver writes with startling intensity.' -- Victoria Gosling, author of Before the Ruins 'The Weight of Loss is a wrenching, viscerally weird novel of grief, longing and mortality. Perceptive, erudite and powerful, I haven't been able to stop thinking about how much I loved it!' -- Leon Craig, author of Parallel Hells 'Intelligent, addictive, and unsettling. Sally Oliver is a thoughtful, gorgeous writer, and this layered exploration of trauma, family, and selfhood will linger.' -- Julia Fine, author of What Should Be Wild 'A deeply unsettling story, told at a brilliantly controlled pace and rendered in luminous prose. It's like the love child of early Ian McEwan and Nicola Barker.' -- Ali Millar, author of The Last Days 'An affecting portrait of a young life shaped by grief, set against an unnerving, surreal medical backdrop, somewhere between My Year of Rest and Relaxation and A Cure for Wellness... A remarkable, thought-provoking, vivid book.' -- Will Wiles, author of Plume 'The Weight of Loss is a beautifully written and intensely felt novel. Its subject matter - grief and mortality - is timeless, but its method, a startling combination of emotional realism and gothic horror, feels brand new.' -- Ian McGuire, author of The Abstainer 'Strangely ethereal, yet entirely solid and compelling, this is a unique novel that talks with startling clarity and composure about the in-between spaces, the possibilities of being, and the connection between the living and the dead.' -- Alice Ash, author of Paradise Block 'A...reflective but ultimately engrossing thriller with a strong emotional core.' * Bookbag * 'The Weight of Loss ripples with visceral language that conceals an ominous underbelly, ever threatening to burst free... Oliver's prose is quite captivating. She writes with a poetic precision, deftly balancing sections with words charged with sexual and fatalistic tension in equal parts.' -- Chicago Review of Books 'Gripping, gory and addictive... An exploration of grief and trauma in a weird health retreat where all is not as it seems.' -- Amanda Craig, author of The Golden Rule 'I started reading The Weight of Loss without knowing what to expect. And I was delighted to be gripped from the very first page - a very curious and compelling opening scene - and I finished the novel in 3 days. It is addictive reading, carrying the reader along through a clever narrative structure and raising many intriguing questions. The last fifty pages are intense and I was swept along by the strangeness of the story. But it is both strange and somehow very real at the same time: I've never read anything quite like it. Beautiful!' -- Lucy Ashe, author of Clara & Olivia