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ARE YOU LISTENING? DAY"
I AM EXCITED TO SHARE WITH YOU ABOUT
THIS RECENT AUDIO BOOK I RECEIVED
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THE LONELY HEARTS HOTEL
READ BY JULIA WHELAN
BY HEATHER O'NEILL
ABOUT THE AUDIO BOOK:
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.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Photo: © Julia C. Vona
PRAISE FOR HEATHER O'NEILL:
“O’Neill’s lively style is so filled with vivid descriptions and complex
characters that the reader’s experience is virtually cinematic… in the
hands of this brilliant author, even the ugliest events are depicted
with the most musical cadences, soaring arias and symphonic resolutions.
Filled with inspired twists and turns, the tale is utterly compelling,
creating a world where desperation and love coexist.” —The Washington Post
“A larger-than-life, gritty love story that reads like a fable…The greatest strength of O’Neill’s work, however, is her wholly unique narrative voice, which is at once cool and panoramic, yet shockingly intimate and wisely philosophical. The novel brims with shimmering one-liners.” —The Boston Globe
“Art, love, imagination — these values are held aloft in O’Neill’s novel, with Pierrot and Rose floating through life as ‘collector[s] of beautiful moments’… the nature of the theatrical spectacle Rose and Pierrot and company have created speaks to the mesmerizing effects of the novel itself.” —The San Francisco Chronicle
“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
“Heather O’Neill’s style is laced with so much sublime possibility and merciless reality that it makes me think of comets and live wires and William Blake’s “The Tyger.” Between prose like that and a story like this, you have a book that raises goosebumps and the giddiest of grins.” —Helen Oyeyemi, author of What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours
“A larger-than-life, gritty love story that reads like a fable…The greatest strength of O’Neill’s work, however, is her wholly unique narrative voice, which is at once cool and panoramic, yet shockingly intimate and wisely philosophical. The novel brims with shimmering one-liners.” —The Boston Globe
“Art, love, imagination — these values are held aloft in O’Neill’s novel, with Pierrot and Rose floating through life as ‘collector[s] of beautiful moments’… the nature of the theatrical spectacle Rose and Pierrot and company have created speaks to the mesmerizing effects of the novel itself.” —The San Francisco Chronicle
“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
“Heather O’Neill’s style is laced with so much sublime possibility and merciless reality that it makes me think of comets and live wires and William Blake’s “The Tyger.” Between prose like that and a story like this, you have a book that raises goosebumps and the giddiest of grins.” —Helen Oyeyemi, author of What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours
1 comments:
So happy about the baby girl! This audio book sounds interesting.
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