-
Your next favorite book
is waiting.
Summary | Discuss | Reviews | More Information | Read-Alikes
With echoes of The Night Circus, 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.
BookBrowsers ask Heather O'Neill
When We Lost Our Heads was my favourite to write. Lullabies for Little Criminals is the one I am most proud of. The Girl Who Was Saturday Night was the most challenging (second books are a killer for writers!). My favourite characters are always my heroines who are born with a touch of wickedness...
-Heather_O
"Starred Review. O'Neill is a mistress of metaphor and imagery ("her sobs were flung on the deck"). This is brilliant tragicomedy…in a melancholy love story that brings to life the bygone days of theatrical revues. It's a little weird and a lot of fun." –Booklist
"Starred Review. O'Neill's prose is crisp and strange, arresting in its frankness; much like the novel itself, her writing is both gleefully playful and devastatingly sad. Big and lush and extremely satisfying; a rare treat." - Kirkus
"Starred Review. The star-crossed love affair of the poor orphans who team up to create an enchanting circus might sound like a book that has already been written once or twice, but don't be fooled. This is an original and unforgettable novel." - Library Journal
"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
"Because this book is so filled with delightful things, 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, author of The First Bad Man
"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, author of Pulitzer Prize finalist Get in Trouble
This information about The Lonely Hearts Hotel was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Heather O'Neill is a novelist, short-story writer and essayist. Her work includes When We Lost Our Heads, a #1 national bestseller and a finalist for the Grand Prix du Livre de Montréal, 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, and Lullabies for Little Criminals, The Girl Who Was Saturday Night, and Daydreams of Angels, 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. O'Neill has also won CBC's Canada Reads and the Danuta Gleed Award. Born and raised in Montreal, O'Neill lives there today.
If you liked The Lonely Hearts Hotel, try these:
by Dan Chaon
Published 2026
A playfully macabre and utterly thrilling tale about orphaned twins on the run from their murderous uncle who find refuge in a bizarre traveling carnival, from a master of literary horror.
by Lucy Ashe
Published 2024
A novel about obsessive love featuring two ballet dancers—identical twin sisters Olivia and Clara Marionetta—with a terrifying climax set in the world of ballet in pre-war London.
by Edwidge Danticat
Published 2020
From the internationally acclaimed, best-selling author of Brother, I'm Dying, a collection of vividly imagined stories about community, family, and love.
Wherever they burn books, in the end will also burn human beings.
Click Here to find out who said this, as well as discovering other famous literary quotes!
Can you name the title?
Test your book knowledge with our daily trivia challenge!
Your guide toexceptional books
BookBrowse seeks out and recommends the best in contemporary fiction and nonfiction—books that not only engage and entertain but also deepen our understanding of ourselves and the world around us.
