The Lonely Hearts Hotel
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The Lonely Hearts Hotel by Heather O'neill
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.
Heather O'Neill is a contributor to This American Life, and her writing has appeared in outlets such as the New York Times Magazine. In 2007, her international bestseller Lullabies for Little Criminals received the Paragraphe Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction and the Canada Reads competition, and was shortlisted for seven accolades, including the Orange Prize for Fiction and Canada's Governor General's Literary Award, as well as being longlisted for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. Her most recent work, The Girl Who Was Saturday Night, was called one of the finest books of the year by various magazines and was shortlisted for the 2014 Scotiabank Giller Prize and longlisted for the 2015 Bailey's Women's Prize for Fiction and the Encore Award. She currently resides in Montreal.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9780735213746 |
| ISBN 10 | 0735213747 |
| Title | The Lonely Hearts Hotel |
| Author | Heather O'neill |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Paperback |
| Publisher | Penguin Putnam Inc |
| Year published | 2018-01-02 |
| Number of pages | 400 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |