The Octopus Has Three Hearts
Prize(s): Long-listed Giller Prize (2021), Short-listed Nancy Richler Memorial Prize For Fiction (2023).
The Octopus Has Three Hearts offers dispatches from the margins of human society. These are stories about damaged people who have committed, witnessed or survived terrible acts and who must make their way in an unforgiving world.
From a goat farmer to a suburban adulterer, a violent child to a polyamorous marine biologist, Rose’s diverse characters have little in common except a life-sustaining connection to the animal world. The octopus, dogs, pigs, chameleons, bats, parrots, rats and sugar gliders in their lives extend a measure of compassion and solace that their human communities lack.
Rachel Rose’s finely tuned sense of irony is evident in this collection, which embraces the strange and unexpected, exploring the outer limits of empathy and forgiveness. Her flawed and broken characters, who may range far from readers’ own lived experiences, reveal universal elements of the human condition and the curious redemption of the human-animal bond.
"The title is I guess a little tongue-in-cheek. I wanted it to have both the meaning of anyone who's ever found their companionship or their family with an animal, a non-human. But also the beasts in my stories are human. There are stories where a pig is a much better son than a biological child and is much more reliable and kinder, and stories where people who've been exiled have beasts in their lives support them when humans have rejected them.”
CBC Radio. Posted: Apr 14, 2022
Praise
“I loved every one of these stories. I wish I had written them.”
–Barbara Gowdy, author ofThe White Bone
“In The Octopus Has Three Hearts, Rachel Rose has built her own version of Noah’s Ark, filling it not only with a panoply of animals but the damaged people who love them. Rose’s deft, daring, and highly original collection kept me enthralled with its balance of often-violent detail and compassionate storytelling.”
–Kevin Chong, author ofThe Plague
“What role do animals play in the lives of people? This is the question posed by author Rachel Rose in her bold, unabashed debut short fiction ... these compassionate, skilfully written stories will undoubtedly appeal to animal lovers as well as readers of literary short stories.”
–Bev Sandell Greenberg,Winnipeg Free Press
“...the individual stories are very strong.”
–Quill and Quire
“There is a buoyancy to the writing that with humor, insight and surprise carries the reader through stories that range from the magical to gritty realism. Read collectively they tell of a world tilting on its axis and in need of greater empathy and understanding to right itself. A world familiar and yet also defamiliarized in the telling.”
–Karim Alrawi, Los Angeles Review of Books