'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
