Wordfest presents Heather O’Neill – $20

[gdlr_button href="https://www.eventbrite.com/e/wordfest-presents-heather-oneill-tickets-31693492088" target="_self" size="medium" background="#f2674a" color="#ffffff" border_color="#999999"]Buy Tickets[/gdlr_button] Join Wordfest and the Calgary Public Library for an evening with Heather O'Neill, author of the critically acclaimed Lullabies for Little Criminals and two-time Giller Prize shortlisted nominee. O’Neill presents her latest novel, The Lonely Hearts Hotel, a dazzling circus of a story set in the seductive underside of Montreal and New York between the wars. The event includes an on-stage interview, reading and book signing. Hosted by Eric Volmers for the Calgary Herald.

About Heather O'Neill

Heather O’Neill is a Canadian novelist, poet, short-story writer, screenwriter and essayist. Her work, which includes Lullabies for Little Criminals, The Girl Who Was Saturday Night and Daydreams of Angels, has been shortlisted for the Governor General’s Award for Fiction, the Orange Prize for Fiction and the Scotiabank Giller Prize in two consecutive years, and has won CBC Canada Reads, the Paragraphe Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction and the Danuta Gleed award. Born and raised in Montreal, O’Neill lives there today with her daughter.

About The Lonely Hearts Hotel by Heather O'Neill

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. [gdlr_button href="https://www.eventbrite.com/e/wordfest-presents-heather-oneill-tickets-31693492088" target="_self" size="medium" background="#f2674a" color="#ffffff" border_color="#999999"]Buy Tickets[/gdlr_button] [gdlr_notification icon="icon-flag" type="color-background" background="#99d15e" color="#000000"]Please note that tickets to this event are only available online through Eventbrite. Phone orders are not possible. However, please contact the Wordfest office at 403-237-9068 for assistance with your order. [/gdlr_notification]