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Inventive, outlandish, and tender fairy tales from a bestselling author.
The fantastic has always been at the edges of Heather O'Neill's work. In her bestselling novels Lullabies for Little Criminals and The Girl Who Was Saturday Night, she transformed the shabbiest streets of Montreal with her beautiful, freewheeling metaphors. She described the smallest of things - a stray cat or a second-hand coat - with an intensity that made them otherworldly.
In Daydreams of Angels, O'Neill's first collection of short stories, she gives free rein to her imaginative gifts. In "The Ugly Ducklings," generations of Nureyev clones live out their lives in a grand Soviet experiment. In "Dear Piglet," a teenaged cult follower writes a letter to explain the motivation behind her crime. And in another tale, a grandmother reveals where babies come from: the beach, where young mothers-to-be hunt for infants in the surf. Each of these beguiling stories twists the beloved narratives of childhood- - fairy tales, storybooks, Bible stories - to uncover the deepest truths of family life.
"O'Neill is at her best in the longer stories and the ones more grounded in reality, where she has a chance to develop her characters and explore their darkness." - Publishers Weekly
"Keep this collection on the nightstand, and you'll be sure to kick your dreamscape up a notch." - Kirkus
This information about Daydreams of Angels 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.
Julie Artacho
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, 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. O'Neill has also won CBC's Canada Reads and the Danuta Gleed Award. The Capital of Dreams is her most recent novel. Born and raised in Montreal, O'Neill lives there today.
My Darling Boy by John Dufresne
The story of of a man whose son collapses into addiction and vanishes into the chaotic netherworld of southern Florida.
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