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    The Weight of This World
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    The Weight of This World
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    The Weight of This World
    Audiobook7 hours

    The Weight of This World

    Written by David Joy

    Narrated by MacLeod Andrews

    4/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    Critically acclaimed author David Joy, whose debut, Where All Light Tends to Go, was hailed as "a savagely moving novel that will likely become an important addition to the great body of Southern literature" (The Huffington Post), returns to the mountains of North Carolina with a powerful story about the inescapable weight of the past.

    A combat veteran returned from war, Thad Broom can't leave the hardened world of Afghanistan behind, nor can he forgive himself for what he saw there. His mother, April, is haunted by her own demons, a secret trauma she has carried for years. Between them is Aiden McCall, loyal to both but unable to hold them together. Connected by bonds of circumstance and duty, friendship and love, these three lives are blown apart when Aiden and Thad witness the accidental death of their drug dealer and a riot of dope and cash drops in their laps. On a meth-fueled journey to nowhere, they will either find the grit to overcome the darkness or be consumed by it.

    From the Hardcover edition.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPenguin Random House Audio
    Release dateMar 7, 2017
    ISBN9781524751487
    Unavailable
    The Weight of This World
    Author

    David Joy

    David Joy is the author of When These Mountains Burn (winner of the 2020 Dashiell Hammett Award), The Line That Held Us (winner of the 2018 Southern Book Prize), The Weight of This World, and Where All Light Tends to Go (Edgar finalist for Best First Novel). His stories and creative nonfiction have appeared in a number of publications, and he is the author of the memoir Growing Gills: A Fly Fisherman’s Journey and a coeditor of Gather at the River: Twenty-Five Authors on Fishing. Joy lives in Tuckasegee, North Carolina.

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    Reviews for The Weight of This World

    4/5

    58 ratings10 reviews

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    • 4/5
      The Weight of This World was my first book by North Carolina writer, David Joy. The book and the characters in this book were a little rough around the edges. This book was dark and violent at times, but Joy’s writing was superb and you can’t help but find yourself hoping the best for these characters.Thad and Adien have been best friends since they were children. When Adien’s parents died, he moved into a trailer with Thad. Thad lived in an abandoned trailer behind his mother’s house. The two friends are more like family and they lived together up until Thad enlisted in the military. It’s obvious when Thad returns from the war that he is haunted by the things he saw and did during his service. “His memories had become something physical that he had to carry through this world.” He also had to carry the fact that his mother, April, never really loved him. April has some traumatic buried secrets of her own. “There were so many things she carried, memories that lay heavy as stone. All of those things stayed bottled and building. All of those things had damn near broken her in two.” She is unable to love her son because of some things that happened to her in the past. While Thad is away, April and Aiden develop a relationship.Adien has always been a very loyal friend to Thad. Aiden wants to improve his life by moving to Asheville to start over, but Thad refuses to go and Aiden refuses go without him. Aiden, “No matter what he did, it seemed some higher power had it out for him, and that kind of certainty comes to leave a man numb after a while.”“All the weight of this world seemed to be on him right then and he just stood there staring out into nothing at all unsure how much longer he could go without buckling beneath it.”All of these characters are broken, torn, troubled and haunted. No matter what they do, things never get better for them. From Megan Abbott’s review: “The Weight of This World, is a tale of exquisite grit. David Joy is willing to go to all the dark places, but his voice and his heart serve as such strong beacons what we’ll follow him and take our chances. Those chances pay off in a story that is as tense and harrowing as it is achingly tender.”
    • 5/5
      Set in Jackson County, North Carolina, this book is about childhood friends Thad and Aiden and Thad's mother April. Aiden was orphaned by an act of murder/suicide when he was very young. Thad, while not technically an orphan, never had the love of a family. I've grown a little tired of grit lit, which tends to be cliche-ridden, but I really liked this book. Yes, there were guns and meth, but this was more a story of inevitable tragedy than it was of stupid people making bad choices. The three characters felt very real, trapped in a place where none of them wanted to be. When Thad and Aiden rob a dead meth dealer, that move seems not just dumb but also understandable under the circumstances and acts as a catalyst, taking the characters to the place that their pasts had already doomed them. I loved the author's writing style and I cared about each of the characters. The reason that I wasn't crazy about the epilogue was that it smashed my hopes for one of the characters into smithereens. I will definitely read more by this author. The narration of the audiobook by MacLeod Andrews also very good.I received a free copy of the e-book from the publisher, however I wound up listening to the audiobook borrowed from the library.
    • 4/5
      He wasn't sorry then and he wasn't sorry now. There was wickedness in this world that swallowed any light that might've been, darkness that could be answered only with darkness.The Weight of This World by David Joy tells the story of Aidan McCall and his friendship with Thad Broom. When Aidan was twelve, he watched his father shoot his mother and then himself. This is the opening scene in the book and certainly paves the way for the rest of it. Aidan eventually ends up living in a trailer with his buddy, Thad, who was moved out of his house by his new step-father. The two boys raise themselves, Thad eventually joining the army and serving in Afghanistan, but returning to live in the same single-wide and to the same life of picking up occasional work, but mainly getting by by stripping foreclosed houses of their copper wiring. Aidan would like to leave the hamlet of Little Canada, in the mountains of North Carolina, to go to Asheville or maybe even further afield, somewhere where the jobs paid better and were easier to find. He's trying to save a little, but Thad is content to spend whatever money they come by on booze and meth. It's the meth that gets them in trouble. The Weight of This World fits into the sort of gritty Appalachian noir of Daniel Woodrell and Donald Ray Pollock. There's a lot of violence, some of it breath-taking in it's random casualness, and a bleak sense of place that shows in both the beauty of the mountains and hollows, and in the relentless poverty of the people living there. There are grace notes and Joy never forgets to write his characters, large and small, as real people, but this isn't a book for the faint of heart.
    • 5/5
      Dark, dismal, and characters without hope. David Joy is a fantastic writer! If Southern Noir or Grit lit is your thing, make sure you add this to your list. The audiobook book narrator did an excellent job on this also.
    • 4/5
      This was phenomenal story all the way through. Don't come into a David joy novel without expecting every single character to be broken all to shit, because that's what the man excels in...broken people begging and stealing and crying out for redemption.

      David Joy, for me, is like a darker, grimmer John Hart. They both write beautifully, and see the world through mostly cynical eyes, but damn, can they tell a story.

      The only thing that had me pulling a star off this one was the lack of a specific ending. And I'm not talking the last bit, I'm talking the bit before the last bit (yeah, I ain't gonna spoil the novel, so you'll have to read it to get what I'm talking about here).

      It was a small flaw in an otherwise stunning novel.
    • 4/5
      Short Summary: Aiden McCall and Thad Broom have been best friends since they were children, both trapped by the imaginary confines of their hometown even after a huge amount of money ends up in their possession after witnessing the violent death of their drug dealer.Thoughts: Joy’s graceful prose is all the more evident when its backdrop is a brutal tale but the two pair perfectly by focusing on the powerful loyalty between two lifelong friends.Verdict: There’s no sophomore slump to be had here; The Weight of the World is just as fantastic as Where All Light Tends to Go which makes the wait for The Line That Held Us all the more interminable.
    • 5/5
      The Weight of This World by David Joy is a red-neck noir story set in Appalachia. The story centers on two boys, Thad an unloved child of rape, and Aiden, the child of a father who killed both himself and his mother. The two boys grow up together in a dilapidated trailer and forge a strong bond. They think of themselves as brothers. Thad goes to war and comes back a damaged vet and needs the strength of Aiden, along with plenty of booze and meth to help him get through the days. His mother, April, haunted by her own experiences, has also learned to lean on Aiden for comfort and support. All three lives are about to be shattered when the boy’s drug dealer accidentally shots himself. This triggers a series of drug-addled situations that spiral out of control.I have a weakness for books set in Appalachia. It is a totally different world from the one I live in and I am both fascinated and repelled by it’s dark beauty. The mountains of North Carolina make a lush backdrop to this brutal tale. But as dark and tragic as the story is, I came to care for all these troubled characters. Despite the sense of inevitability that the author infuses throughout the story, The Weight of This World was an outstanding read. David Joy is an author that I will be looking for again as I was impressed by both his descriptive powers and his realistic dialogue.
    • 3/5
      The weight of this world has weighed heavily on the shoulders of the three main characters. Thad is back from a tour in Afghanistan and can’t come to terms with the horrific event that happened there. His mother, April, has her own secrets and violent past that she’s battling to get out from under. And Aidan watched his father kill himself and Aidan’s mother when he was a child. There’s no honest work to be found so Thad and Aidan find some dishonest work and both turn to alcohol and drugs to get through their days. When their drug dealer violently dies, his drugs and money are theirs but only if they can stay away from the meth long enough to figure out what to do with it.Doesn’t sound too cheery, does it? This is a very dark book but that isn’t what bothered me about this one. We each have our own demons to bear and while some people’s demons may be worse than others, we all have choices to make in life. We can choose to blame our rotten luck and we can blame our stupid choices on others. But in the end, those choices are ours to make and we really only have ourselves to blame for them. This author didn’t seem to see it that way. In reading the glowing reviews of this book, I expected to feel great compassion for these characters. They certainly had been through a lot and I tried to feel compassionate for them. But while I felt sympathy for them, I also felt turned off by them and their choices. I now read those glowing reviews and wonder how the writers of those reviews could have read the same book as I did. At one point Aidan says, “Perhaps God just had it out for certain folks and he’d been borne one of the unlucky ones.” That’s pretty much the theme of the whole book. So why am I giving it even 3 stars? The writing is really beautiful. Here’s one random example taken from an Advanced Reading Copy so the wording may change in the final edition:“They crawled along the edges of great cairns, stones the size of houses balanced with an unfathomable gravity as if they’d been set just so by the hands of some watchmaker god.”The beauty of the language the author uses in some places contrasts sharply with the rough, coarse language used elsewhere. If these characters could have looked around them at the beauty that the author was describing instead of wallowing in their miserable pasts, their spirits would have lifted. While I found the book unpleasant to read, it really is a brilliant lesson on why you shouldn’t let the weight of the world weigh you down.Self-pity is our worst enemy and if we yield to it, we can never do anything wise in this world. ~ Helen Keller
    • 5/5
      At one point in David Joy’s novel Aiden McCall thinks, “Every year bled into the next, just on and on until the day he’d die, and maybe that was all there was to look forward to anymore. Maybe that’s all there is to this old life, just waiting around to die.” The Weight of This World is the story of three very battered individuals, living together in the North Carolina hills, bound by personal history and tragedy. Thad Broom and Aiden McCall were childhood friends. Thad and his mother April saved Aiden when he escaped from an orphanage and needed a home. Aiden was there for Thad when he returned from Afghanistan, emotionally scarred by what he’d seen and done. April, Thad’s mother, has her own tragic past and is haunted with the consequences. Fueled by their individual histories, drugs and alcohol, things go irretrievably awry when a drug deal ends unexpectedly and Thad and Aiden attempt to make good out of a windfall. It’s here where the reader begins to believe that yes, life is just waiting around to die, especially for these three.The Weight of This World is intense and brutal, sometimes painful to read, but also a testament to love and friendship at all costs.
    • 3/5
      'The Weight of This World', David Joy's 2nd novel, was a slog through 250+ pages of unpleasantness. Written in the vernacular of the mountain folk of North Carolina, as was his first (the excellent 'Where All Light Tends to Go'), it's the story of three friends/relatives/roommates (it's complicated....) struggling to get by in the mountains of NC. There's heavy use of nasty drugs (meth), violence, sex, alcohol abuse, gunplay, and all the other fun things people do to forget about their unfortunate lots in life. It's a real downer of a book.I really enjoyed Joy's writing in his first novel, but in this one the language doesn't seem quite as lyrical. Just an overall impression- couldn't really cite chapter and verse on specific examples. The fact that there are no sympathetic characters whatsoever in the book was a problem for me. I'll gladly wade through a well-written novel with unsavory characters if at there's at least one that I can 'root' for that can keep me engaged. In this case, differing gradations of 'bad' was all that separated the characters but there was no one that I really gave a crap about. Hopefully, David Joy will try his hand at a different genre and succeed admirably. I'm personally burned out on his meth-head hillbilly characters.