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@2@@20@'Joyful, funny and vividly alive' Emily St John Mandel@21@@16@@20@'@18@The Lonely Hearts Hotel @19@sucked me right in and only got better and better . . . I began underlining truths I had hungered for' Miranda July@21@@16@@20@'Makes me think of comets and live wires . . . raises goosebumps' Helen Oyeyemi@21@@16@@20@'A fairytale laced with gunpowder' Kelly Link@21@@3@@2@ @18@The Lonely Hearts Hotel@19@ is a love story with a difference. Set throughout the roaring twenties, it is a wicked fairytale of circus tricks and child prodigies, radical chorus girls, drug-addicted musicians and brooding clowns, set in an underworld whose economy hinges on the price of a kiss. @3@@2@It is the tale of two dreamers, abandoned in an orphanage where they were fated to meet. Here, in the face of cold, hunger and unpredictable beatings, Rose and Pierrot create a world of their own, shielding the spark of their curiosity from those whose jealousy will eventually tear them apart.@3@@2@ When they meet again, each will have changed, having struggled through the Depression, through what they have done to fill the absence of the other. But their childhood vision remains - a dream to storm the world, a spectacle, an extravaganza that will lift them out of the gutter and onto a glittering stage. @3@@2@ Heather O'Neill's pyrotechnical imagination and language are like no other. In this she has crafted a dazzling circus of a novel that takes us from the underbellies of war-time Montreal and Prohibition New York, to a theatre of magic where anything is possible - where an orphan girl can rule the world, and a ruined innocence can be redeemed.@3@
