The Lonely Hearts Hotel

Heather O’Neill’s style is laced with so much sublime possibility and merciless actuality (and vice versa) that it makes me think of comets and live wires and william blake’s tyger … between prose like that and a story like this, you have a book that raises goosebumps and the giddiest of grins more or less simultaneously - Helen Oyeyemi

Because this book is so filled with delightful things - bold and complex sex; heartache and wickedness and glittering hearts - it would be easy to overlook how finely it is made. The Lonely Hearts Hotel sucked me right in and only got better and better, ultimately becoming much tougher, wiser than I was prepared for. I began underlining truths I had hungered for but never before read. By the end I was a gasping, tearful mess. - Miranda July

O’Neill is an extraordinary writer, and her new novel is exquisite. She has taken on sadness itself as a subject, but it would be terribly reductive to say that this book is sad; it’s also joyful, funny, and vividly alive. - Emily St John Mandel, author of Station Eleven

A fairy tale laced with gunpowder and romance and icing sugar, all wrapped round with a lit fuse. Each of Heather O’Neill’s sentences pricks or delights. If you haven’t read her other books, start with this one and then read all of the rest. - Kelly Link

Like [Angela] Carter, O’Neill subverts her stories with an adult and casually seamy emphasis, and she is relentlessly inventive - Sunday Times, on Daydreams of Angels

Bombards the reader with piercing observations and magical imagery … Full of pathos, spirit and overwhelmingly, an iridescent innocence - Independent, on Lullabies for Little Criminals

Entrancing and antic and sensual as a dream - Guardian, on The Girl who was Saturday Night