Lullabies for Little Criminals by Heather O'neill

Lullabies for Little Criminals by Heather O'neill

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.

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.