The Lonely Hearts Hotel by Heather O'Neill

Set in Montreal and New York between the wars, a spellbinding story about two orphans whose unusual magnetism and talent allow them to imagine a sensational future, from bestselling, two-time Scotiabank Giller Prize finalist Heather O’Neill

The internationally acclaimed author returns with a stunning national bestseller in The Lonely Hearts Hotel. Exquisitely imagined and hypnotically told, it is a love story with the power of legend.

Two babies are abandoned in a Montreal orphanage in the winter of 1914. Before long, their true 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 for the rich, 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, both escape into the city’s underworld, where they must use their uncommon gifts to survive without each other. Ruthless and unforgiving, Montreal in the 1930s is no place for song and dance, depicted by O’Neill as “a voyage across Montreal, from realms of innocence and districts of longing to zones of cruelty” (National Post). When Rose and Pierrot finally reunite they’ll go to extreme lengths to make their childhood dreams come true.

HEATHER O’NEILL is a novelist, short-story writer and essayist. Her most recent novel, When We Lost Our Heads was a #1 national bestseller and was a finalist for the Grand Prix du Livre de Montréal. Her previous works include The Lonely Hearts Hotel, which won the Paragraphe Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction and was longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction and CBC’s Canada Reads, as well as Lullabies for Little Criminals, The Girl Who Was Saturday Night and Daydreams of Angels, which were shortlisted for the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction, the Orange Prize for Fiction and the Scotiabank Giller Prize two years in a row. She has won CBC’s Canada Reads and the Danuta Gleed Award. Born and raised in Montreal, O’Neill lives there today.