Heather O'Neill -- When We Lost Our Heads -- Inky Phoenix

When We Lost Our Heads

Heather O'Neill

(Riverhead Books, hb., 448 pp.)

The March 2022 pick from the Inky Phoenix, the book club from internationally known yoga teacher, author, and Charleston resident Kathryn Budig.

Blue Bicycle Books is proud to be the official bookstore partner of the Inky Phoenix!

About the book:

Charismatic Marie Antoine is the daughter of the richest man in 19th century Montreal. She has everything she wants, except for a best friend—until clever, scheming Sadie Arnett moves to the neighborhood. Immediately united by their passion and intensity, Marie and Sadie attract and repel each other in ways that thrill them both. Their games soon become tinged with risk, even violence. Forced to separate by the adults around them, they spend years engaged in acts of alternating innocence and depravity. And when a singular event brings them back together, the dizzying effects will upend the city.

Traveling from a repressive finishing school to a vibrant brothel, taking readers firsthand into the brutality of factory life and the opulent lives of Montreal’s wealthy, When We Lost Our Heads dazzlingly explores gender, sex, desire, class, and the terrifying power of the human heart when it can’t let someone go.

About the author:

Heather O’Neill is a novelist, poet, short-story writer, screenwriter, and essayist. Lullabies for Little Criminals, her debut novel, was published in 2006 to international critical acclaim and was short-listed for the Orange Prize for Fiction. Born and raised in Montreal, O’Neill lives there today with her daughter.

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