Heather O'Neill The Lonely Hearts Hotel 2018 Quercus 2018

Synopsis

<p><b>'Joyful, funny and vividly alive' Emily St John Mandel</b><br> <b>'<i>The Lonely Hearts Hotel</i> sucked me right in and only got better and better . . . I began underlining truths I had hungered for' Miranda July</b><br> <b>'Makes me think of comets and live wires . . . raises goosebumps' Helen Oyeyemi</b><br> <b>'A fairytale laced with gunpowder' Kelly Link</b><br> <br> <i>The Lonely Hearts Hotel</i> is a love story with a difference. Set throughout the roaring twenties, it is a wicked fairytale of circus tricks and child prodigies, radical chorus girls, drug-addicted musicians and brooding clowns, set in an underworld whose economy hinges on the price of a kiss.<br> <br> It is the tale of two dreamers, abandoned in an orphanage where they were fated to meet. Here, in the face of cold, hunger and unpredictable beatings, Rose and Pierrot create a world of their own, shielding the spark of their curiosity from those whose jealousy will eventually tear them apart.<br> <br> When they meet again, each will have changed, having struggled through the Depression, through what they have done to fill the absence of the other. But their childhood vision remains - a dream to storm the world, a spectacle, an extravaganza that will lift them out of the gutter and onto a glittering stage.<br> <br> 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.</p>