“The Lonely Hearts Hotel is gaudy, rowdy and magnificent.” - Winnipeg Free Press
“In a love story of epic proportions, O’Neill’s excellent historical novel plumbs the depths of happiness and despair. . . . This novel will cast a spell on readers from page one.” - Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“Art, love, imagination-these values are held aloft in O’Neill’s novel.” - San Francisco Chronicle
“This simultaneously heart-breaking and life-affirming novel depicts the range of the human experience through the eyes of its almost preternaturally charismatic hero and heroine… O’Neill’s prose is gorgeous, with arresting imagery.” - Library Journal(starred review)
“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.” - Boston Globe
 “[The Lonely Hearts Hotel] is a voyage across Montreal, from realms of innocence and districts of longing to zones of cruelty. . . . It’s a sprawling saga that combines a fairy-tale narrative with touches of social history, following two orphans in their struggles against a hostile world.” - National Post
“O’Neill is a mistress of metaphor and imagery…This is brilliant tragicomedy…in a melancholy love story that brings to life the bygone days of theatrical revues.” - Booklist (starred review)
“Fans of the Canadian author’s swirling, lyrical prose will fall for this melancholic love story set in gritty 1920s Montreal.” - Elle (Canada)
“Heather O’Neill is just getting better and better.” - The Globe and Mail
“It would be hard to overstate here just how the good the writing is in The Lonely Hearts Hotel. For it is stunningly, stunningly good.” - Toronto Star
“The novel’s success resides in its deeply loveable protagonists navigating a world of brutality and melancholy. . . . Grotesqueness and pleasure run together in The Lonely Hearts Hotel.” - Quill & Quire
“Walks a tightrope between social and magical realism . . . . She grafts Angela Carter-esque fairytale darkness on to her forays into her native Montreal’s gothic underbelly . . . A gritty, giddy fairyground ride of a book [involving] rapture, wonder and an unquenchable faith in the extraordinary. - Daily Mail
“Walking the hypnotic line between tragedy and fairy tale. . . . the love story that unfolds is a fable of ambition and perseverance, desperation and heartbreak. . . Big and lush and extremely satisfying; a rare treat.” - Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“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 and No One Belongs Here More Than You
“O’Neill is an extraordinary writer, and her new novel is exquisite. The prose is luminous, but this novel has a pitch-black heart. O’Neill 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
“O’Neill is an extraordinary writer, and her new novel is exquisite. . . .O’Neill 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 - bold and complex sex; heartache and wickedness and glittering hearts - 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 and No One Belongs Here More Than You
“This is a work of acute charm and radically deft imagination. Whether probing the behavior of clones for some sign of a relationship between genes and genius, eavesdropping on the anecdotes of abandoned dolls, or detailing the particulars of ‘A Portrait of The Marquis de Sade As A Young Girl’, O’Neill’s stories continually spar with that which so often defines our lives or limits our daring - the problem of pain. Her are characters born of a distinctive sensibility and sent forth to chart the strange and volatile terrain where grace is found, lost, and found again. There’s no thrill quite like encountering tales this tall, and few tall tales offer up their gifts this freely.” - Scotiabank Giller Prize jury citation
“The writing in Daydreams of Angels is characteristically crisp and playful, but with an undercurrent of cruelty that only amplifies each story’s beating heart.” - National Post
“The Girl Who Was Saturday Night is Heather O’Neill’s second novel, and it is the book where she emerges as a fully-formed artist.” - The Globe and Mail
“O’Neill’s unique strength as a prose stylist has always been in the strength of her individual sentences, and in The Girl Who Was Saturday Night, the way she wields an image feels less like style than superpower.” - National Post
“O’Neill is a wondrous writer whose clean declarative sentences push the stories forward. She also has an astonishing gift for metaphor, which she mines as if she has struck the motherlode. The strength of this collection is not just the stories’ delectable absurdity but also their wisdom. O’Neill reflects on the identity of artists, who she says cannot fully live in our world, but must dwell in a place apart to nourish their imaginations.” - Toronto Star
“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
“[These stories are] united by the now-unmistakable O’Neill stamp: compassionately drawn characters from society’s fringes acting out tales of hardship, resilience and sometimes redemption, all told in deceptively simple prose - nobody, but nobody, does simile quite like O’Neill - that at its best attains the level of music.” - Montreal Gazette
“Heather O’Neill does it again! The Girl Who Was Saturday Night is full of quaking love and true sadness, family rackets, heart attacks, feral cats of all sorts, risky trysts, and reeling abandon. O’Neill’s voice is singular, brave, magical, and bursting with stark beauty.” - Lisa Moore, Giller-shortlisted author of Caught
“Magical and inventive.” - Maclean's
“An exuberantly written coming-of-age story ... Flashbulb-bright and memorable ... Nicolas and Nouschka are the beautiful, frozen, fetishised symbols of separatist Quebec. As they try to wrench themselves into being, their story is as entrancing and antic and sensual as a dream” - The Guardian
“A dazzling leap forward. . . . O’Neill writes like a sort of demented angel with an uncanny knack for metaphor.” - Toronto Star
“The stories in Daydreams of Angels are fabulist, often metafictional, and tend to wander beyond the boundaries of their alleged genre or origins to seek out entirely new and poignant territory. . . . there is possibly no better metaphor for this collection’s collective voice: A murmuring, jubilant chorus both anxious to speak and ready to listen.” - NPR.org