Heather O’Neill
All Books By Heather O’Neill
Daydreams of Angels
- By: Heather O’Neill
- Narrator: Erin Moon
- Length: 8 hours 44 minutes
- Publisher: Blackstone Publishing
- Publish date: January 01, 2021
- Language: English
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3.97(920 ratings)
Inventive, outlandish, and tender fairy tales from bestselling author Heather O’Neill
The fantastic has always been at the edges of Heather O’Neill’s work. In her bestselling novels The Lonely Hearts Hotel, Lullabies for Little Criminals and The Girl Who Was Saturday Night, she transforms the shabbiest streets of Montreal with her beautiful, freewheeling metaphors. She describes the smallest of things–a stray cat or a secondhand coat–with an intensity that makes them otherworldly.
In Daydreams of Angels, O’Neill’s first collection of short stories, she gives free rein to her imaginative gifts. In “Swan Lake for Beginners,” generations of Nureyev clones live out their lives in a grand Soviet experiment. In “The Holy Dove Parade,” a teenage cult follower writes a letter to explain the motivation behind her crime. And in another tale, a grandmother reveals where babies come from: the beach, where young mothers-to-be hunt for infants in the surf. Each of these beguiling stories twists the beloved narratives of childhood–fairy tales, fables, Bible parables–to uncover the deepest truths of family life.
... Read moreLullabies for Little Criminals
- By: Heather O’Neill
- Narrator: Miriam McDonald
- Length: 9 hours 2 minutes
- Publisher: HarperAudio
- Publish date: April 26, 2016
- Language: English
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4.01(22372 ratings)
A new deluxe edition of the international bestseller by Heather O’Neill, the Giller-shortlisted author of Daydreams of Angels and The Girl Who Was Saturday Night, featuring an original foreword from the author, to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the coming-of-age story that People describes as “a vivid portrait of life on skid row.”
Baby, all of thirteen years old, is lost in the gangly, coltish moment between childhood and the strange pulls and temptations of the adult world. Her mother is dead; her father, Jules, is scarcely more than a child himself and is always on the lookout for his next score. Baby knows that “chocolate milk” is Jules’ slang for heroin and sees a lot more of that in her house than the real article. But she takes vivid delight in the scrappy bits of happiness and beauty that find their way to her, and moves through the threat of the streets as if she’s been choreographed in a dance.
Soon, though, a hazard emerges that is bigger than even her hard-won survival skills can handle. Alphonse, the local pimp, has his eye on her for his new girl; he wants her body and soul–and what the johns don’t take he covets for himself. At the same time, a tender and naively passionate friendship unfolds with a boy from her class at school, who has no notion of the dark claims on her–which even her father, lost on the nod, cannot totally ignore. Jules consigns her to a stint in juvie hall, and for the moment this perceived betrayal preserves Baby from terrible harm–but after that, her salvation has to be her own invention.
Channeling the artlessly affecting voice of her thirteen-year-old heroine with extraordinary accuracy and power, Heather O’Neill’s heartbreaking and wholly original debut novel blew readers away when it was first published ten years ago. Now in a new deluxe package it is sure to capture its next decade of readers as Baby picks her pathway along the edge of the abyss to arrive at a place of redemption, and of love.
... Read moreThe Girl Who Was Saturday Night
- By: Heather O’Neill
- Narrator: Erin Moon
- Length: 11 hours 41 minutes
- Publisher: Blackstone Publishing
- Publish date: January 01, 2021
- Language: English
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3.82(4101 ratings)
An enchanting story of twins, fame, and heartache by the much-praised author of Lullabies for Little Criminals
Heather O’Neill charmed readers all over the world with her hit, Lullabies for Little Criminals, which documented with a rare and elusive magic the life of a young dreamer on the streets of Montreal. Now, in The Girl Who Was Saturday Night, she returns to the grubby, enchanted city with a light and profound tale of the vice of fame and the ties of family.
Nineteen years old, free of prospects, and inescapably famous, the twins Nicholas and Nouschka Tremblay are trying to outrun the notoriety of their father, a French-Canadian Serge Gainsbourg with a genius for the absurd and for winding up in prison. “Back in the day, he could come home from a show with a paper bag filled with women’s underwear. Outside of Quebec nobody had even heard of him, naturally. Quebec needed stars badly.”
Since the twins were little, Etienne has made them part of his unashamed seduction of the province, parading them on talk shows and then dumping them with their decrepit grandfather while he disappeared into some festive squalor. Now Etienne is washed up and the twins are making their own almost-grown-up messes, with every misstep landing on the front pages of the tabloid Allo Police. Nouschka not only needs to leave her childhood behind; she also has to leave her brother, whose increasingly erratic decisions might take her down with him.
... Read moreThe Lonely Hearts Hotel
- By: Heather O’Neill
- Narrator: Julia Whelan
- Length: 12 hours 1 minutes
- Publisher: Penguin Random House Audio Publishing Group
- Publish date: January 01, 2017
- Language: English
NAMED A BEST BOOK OF 2017 BY THE BOSTON GLOBE AND THE SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE
“So filled with vivid descriptions and complex characters that the reader’s experience is virtually cinematic. . . Utterly compelling.” – The Washington Post
From the author of When We Lost Our Heads, a spellbinding story about two gifted orphans – in love with each other since they can remember – whose childhood talents allow them to rewrite their future.
The Lonely Hearts Hotel is a love story with the power of legend. An unparalleled tale of charismatic pianos, invisible dance partners, radicalized chorus girls, drug-addicted musicians, brooding clowns, and an underworld whose economy hinges on the price of a kiss. In a landscape like this, it takes great creative gifts to thwart one’s origins. It might also take true love.
Two babies are abandoned in a Montreal orphanage in the winter of 1914. Before long, their talents emerge: Pierrot is a piano prodigy; Rose lights up even the dreariest room with her dancing and comedy. As they travel around the city performing clown routines, the children fall in love with each other and dream up a plan for the most extraordinary and seductive circus show the world has ever seen.
Separated as teenagers, sent off to work as servants during the Great Depression, both descend into the city’s underworld, dabbling in sex, drugs and theft in order to survive. But when Rose and Pierrot finally reunite beneath the snowflakes – after years of searching and desperate poverty – the possibilities of their childhood dreams are renewed, and they’ll go to extreme lengths to make them come true. Soon, Rose, Pierrot and their troupe of clowns and chorus girls have hit New York, commanding the stage as well as the alleys, and neither the theater nor the underworld will ever look the same.
With her musical language and extravagantly realized world, Heather O’Neill enchants us with a novel so magical there is no escaping its spell.
... Read moreWhen We Lost Our Heads
- By: Heather O’Neill
- Narrator: Jeanna Phillips
- Length: 14 hours 21 minutes
- Publisher: Penguin Random House Audio Publishing Group
- Publish date: January 01, 2022
- Language: English
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4(6592 ratings)
“Every decent friendship comes with a drop of hatred. But that hatred is like honey in the tea. It makes it addictive.”
Charismatic Marie Antoine is the daughter of the richest man in 19th century Montreal. She has everything she wants, except for a best friend—until clever, scheming Sadie Arnett moves to the neighborhood. Immediately united by their passion and intensity, Marie and Sadie attract and repel each other in ways that thrill them both. Their games soon become tinged with risk, even violence. Forced to separate by the adults around them, they spend years engaged in acts of alternating innocence and depravity. And when a singular event brings them back together, the dizzying effects will upend the city.
Traveling from a repressive finishing school to a vibrant brothel, taking readers firsthand into the brutality of factory life and the opulent lives of Montreal’s wealthy, When We Lost Our Heads dazzlingly explores gender, sex, desire, class, and the terrifying power of the human heart when it can’t let someone go.
... Read more