The Weight of Compassion and Other EssaysTHERE ARE MANY facets to Samuel Becketts writing humour, despair, love, poignancy, suffering but for me there is one dominant characteristic, compassion, compassion for the human condition of existence. So begins the title essay by Eoin OBrien, an observation that stands for the collection as it broadens out into convergent streams of essays on literature and medicine. Part One uses on the nature of friendship and connectivity, on the role of the good

he discovered a secret so dark that it threatened the very existence of the Catholic Church

concluding with appreciations of Beckett as a poet and Irishman by Brendan Kennelly and James Mays

Limited edition (1 of 500)

‘Setting Foot on the Shores of Connemara’

Self-exiled to Bath in England with his housekeeper during the 1970s

Dublin (later touring to the Crawford Art Gallery

from The Dancing Waiters to Duck Soup in the Black Sea

to the final one

he tells of origins in Edwardian Belfast and evokes memories of secondary education at Elmwood Sunday School

it now appears for the first time in paperback

lovers embracing in St Stephen’s Green

The fallout of Ireland’s financial collapse provokes dangerous tensions in a small Irish town