The Lonely Hearts Hotel
Heather O'Neill"To read Heather O’Neill’s dazzling new novel, The Lonely Hearts Hotel, is to enter an enchanting and poetic world that is also amusing, troubling and often lascivious. O’Neill’s lively style is so filled with vivid descriptions and complex characters that the reader’s experience is virtually cinematic." - Eugenia, Zuckerman, The Washington Post
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.
“Art, love, imagination - these values are held aloft in O’Neill’s novel, with Pierrot and Rose floating through life as ‘collector[s] of beautiful moments’... the nature of the theatrical spectacle Rose and Pierrot and company have created speaks to the mesmerizing effects of the novel itself.” - The San Francisco Chronicle
Heather O'Neill's pyrotechnical imagination and language are like no other. In this, she has crafted a dazzling circus of a novel that takes us from the underbellies of war-time Montreal and Prohibition New York, to a theatre of magic where anything is possible - where an orphan girl can rule the world, and a ruined innocence can be redeemed.