The Lonely Hearts Hotel

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Riverhead Books, 2017 - Fiction - 389 pages
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

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.

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About the author (2017)

Heather O'Neill is a Canadian novelist, poet, short story writer, screenwriter and journalist. She was born in Montreal, Quebec. O'Neill published her debut novel, Lullabies for Little Criminals, in 2006. The novel was then selected for the 2007 edition of Canada Reads. The book also won the Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction and was shortlisted for eight other major awards, including the Orange Prize for Fiction and the Governor General's Award and was longlisted for IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. O'Neill was educated at Dawson College and McGill University. She has also written for The New York Times Magazine, The National Post, The Globe and Mail, and The Toronto Star.

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