From the author of the international bestseller Lullabies for Little Criminals, a coming-of-age novel set on the seedy side of Montreal’s St. Laurent Boulevard
Gorgeous twins Noushcka and Nicolas Tremblay live with their grandfather Loulou in a tiny, sordid apartment on St. Laurent Boulevard. They are hopelessly promiscuous, wildly funny and infectiously charming. They are also the only children of the legendary Québécois folksinger Étienne Tremblay, who was as famous for his brilliant lyrics about working-class life as he was for his philandering bon vivant lifestyle and his fall from grace. Known by the public since they were children as Little Noushcka and Little Nicolas, the two inseparable siblings have never been allowed to be ordinary. On the eve of their twentieth birthday, the twins’ self-destructive shenanigans catch up with them when Noushcka agrees to be beauty queen in the local St. Jean Baptiste Day parade. The media spotlight returns, and the attention of a relentless journalist exposes the cracks in the family’s relationships. Though Noushcka tries to leave her family behind, for better or worse, Noushcka is a Tremblay, and when tragedy strikes, home is the only place she wants to be.
With all the wit and poignancy that made Baby such a beloved character in Lullabies for Little Criminals, O’Neill writes of an unusual family and what binds them together and tears them apart. The Girl Who Was Saturday Night is classic, unforgettable Heather O’Neill.

The Girl Who Was Saturday Night

Literature & Fiction

O'Neill, Heather

Literary

HarperCollins, Publishers

Heather O’Neill’s critically acclaimed debut novel, with a new introduction from the author to celebrate its ten-year anniversary
Baby, all of thirteen years old, is lost in the gangly, coltish moment between childhood and the strange pulls and temptations of the adult world. Her mother is dead; her father, Jules, is scarcely more than a child himself and is always on the lookout for his next score. Baby knows that “chocolate milk” is Jules’ slang for heroin and sees a lot more of that in her house than the real thing. But she takes vivid delight in the scrappy bits of happiness and beauty that find their way to her, and moves through the threat of the streets as if she’s been choreographed in a dance.
Soon, though, a hazard emerges that is bigger than even her hard-won survival skills can handle. Alphonse, the local pimp, has his eye on her for his new girl—and what the johns don’t take he covets for himself. If Baby cannot learn to become her own salvation, his dark world threatens to claim her, body and soul.
Channeling the artlessly affecting voice of her thirteen-year-old heroine with extraordinary accuracy and power, Heather O’Neill’s debut novel blew readers away when it was first published ten years ago. Now it’s sure to capture its next decade of readers as Baby picks her pathway along the edge of the abyss to arrive at a place of redemption, and of love.
Featuring a new introduction from the author
CBC Canada reads winner, Paragraphe Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction winner, Orange Prize for Fiction finalist, Governor General’s Literary Award finalist, International Impac Dublin Literary Award finalist
Praise for Lullabies for Little Criminals
“A vivid portrait of life on skid row.”—People
“A nuanced, endearing coming-of-age novel you won’t want to miss.”—Quill And Quire
“Vivid and poignant. . . . A deeply moving and troubling novel.”—The Independent (London)
“O’Neill is a tragicomedienne par excellence. . . . You will not want to miss this tender depiction of some very mean streets.”—Montreal Review of Books

Lullabies for Little Criminals

Harper-perennial

A new deluxe edition of the international bestseller by Heather O’Neill, the Giller-shortlisted author of Daydreams of Angels and The Girl Who Was Saturday Night, featuring an original foreword from the author, to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the coming-of-age story that People describes as “a vivid portrait of life on skid row.”
Baby, all of thirteen years old, is lost in the gangly, coltish moment between childhood and the strange pulls and temptations of the adult world. Her mother is dead; her father, Jules, is scarcely more than a child himself and is always on the lookout for his next score. Baby knows that “chocolate milk” is Jules’ slang for heroin and sees a lot more of that in her house than the real article. But she takes vivid delight in the scrappy bits of happiness and beauty that find their way to her, and moves through the threat of the streets as if she’s been choreographed in a dance. Soon, though, a hazard emerges that is bigger than even her hard-won survival skills can handle. Alphonse, the local pimp, has his eye on her for his new girl; he wants her body and soul—and what the johns don’t take he covets for himself. At the same time, a tender and naively passionate friendship unfolds with a boy from her class at school, who has no notion of the dark claims on her—which even her father, lost on the nod, cannot totally ignore. Jules consigns her to a stint in juvie hall, and for the moment this perceived betrayal preserves Baby from terrible harm—but after that, her salvation has to be her own invention. Channeling the artlessly affecting voice of her thirteen-year-old heroine with extraordinary accuracy and power, Heather O’Neill’s heartbreaking and wholly original debut novel blew readers away when it was first published ten years ago. Now in a new deluxe package it is sure to capture its next decade of readers as Baby picks her pathway along the edge of the abyss to arrive at a place of redemption, and of love.

Lullabies for Little Criminals: A Novel

Dramas & Plays

iLit Remix: A Revolution of Text Forms

Reference

Tamaki, Mariko

Hopkinson, Nalo

Tsabari, Ayelet

Chong, Kevin

Munroe, Jim

Chan, Marty

Poplak, Richard

Powers, Steve

Barwin, Gary

Blake, Becky

White, Melanie

Dimaline, Cherie

Miller,Jeff

Mahadevan, Anand

Thammavongsa, Souvankham

Dawson, Willow

Villegas, Halli

Cooke, Rachel

Proulx-Turner, Sharron

Basu, Arjun

Jackson, Lyanda

Malika, Jamilah

Olson, Geoff

Rahman, Kashfia

Sanderson, Steven Keewatin

Stewart, Adhimu

Words, Language & Grammar

McGraw-Hill/Ryerson

An enchanting story of twins, fame, and heartache by the much-praised author of Lullabies for Little Criminals Heather O'Neill charmed readers in the hundreds of thousands with her sleeper hit, Lullabies for Little Criminals, which documented with a rare and elusive magic the life of a young dreamer on the streets of Montreal. Now, in The Girl Who Was Saturday Night, she returns to the grubby, enchanted city with a light and profound tale of the vice of fame and the ties of family.
Nineteen years old, free of prospects, and inescapably famous, the twins Nicolas and Nouschka Tremblay are trying to outrun the notoriety of their father, a French-Canadian Serge Gainsbourg with a genius for the absurd and for winding up in prison. "Back in the day, he could come home from a show with a paper bag filled with women's underwear. Outside of Québec nobody had even heard of him, naturally. Québec needed stars badly."
Since the twins were little, Étienne has made them part of his unashamed seduction of the province, parading them on talk shows and then dumping them with their decrepit grandfather while he disappeared into some festive squalor. Now Étienne is washed up and the twins are making their own almost-grown-up messes, with every misstep landing on the front pages of the tabloid Allo Police. Nouschka not only needs to leave her childhood behind; she also has to leave her brother, whose increasingly erratic decisions might take her down with him.

The Girl Who Was Saturday Night: A Novel

Farrar. Straus and Giroux

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 transforms the shabbiest streets of Montreal with her beautiful, freewheeling metaphors. She describes the smallest of things―a stray cat or a secondhand coat―with an intensity that makes them otherworldly.
In Daydreams of Angels, O’Neill’s first collection of short stories, she gives free rein to her imaginative gifts. In “Swan Lake for Beginners,” generations of Nureyev clones live out their lives in a grand Soviet experiment. In “The Holy Dove Parade,” a teenage 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, fables, Bible parables―to uncover the deepest truths of family life.

Daydreams of Angels: Stories

An enchanting story of twins, fame, and heartache by the much-praised author of Lullabies for Little Criminals Heather O'Neill charmed readers in the hundreds of thousands with her sleeper hit, Lullabies for Little Criminals, which documented with a rare and elusive magic the life of a young dreamer on the streets of Montreal. Now, in The Girl Who Was Saturday Night, she returns to the grubby, enchanted city with a light and profound tale of the vice of fame and the ties of family.
Nineteen years old, free of prospects, and inescapably famous, the twins Nicolas and Nouschka Tremblay are trying to outrun the notoriety of their father, a French-Canadian Serge Gainsbourg with a genius for the absurd and for winding up in prison. "Back in the day, he could come home from a show with a paper bag filled with women's underwear. Outside of Québec nobody had even heard of him, naturally. Québec needed stars badly."
Since the twins were little, Étienne has made them part of his unashamed seduction of the province, parading them on talk shows and then dumping them with their decrepit grandfather while he disappeared into some festive squalor. Now Étienne is washed up and the twins are making their own almost-grown-up messes, with every misstep landing on the front pages of the tabloid Allo Police. Nouschka not only needs to leave her childhood behind; she also has to leave her brother, whose increasingly erratic decisions might take her down with him.

About the Author Heather O'Neill is a contributor to This American Life, and her work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine,among other publications. Her novel Lullabies for Little Criminals, an international bestseller, won the Paragraphe Hugh McLennan Prize for Fiction and the Canada Reads competition in 2007; was short-listed for six prizes, including the Orange Prize for Fiction and the Governor General’s Literary Award; and was long-listed for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. She lives in Montreal, Canada. Product Description 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 transforms the shabbiest streets of Montreal with her beautiful, freewheeling metaphors. She describes the smallest of things―a stray cat or a secondhand coat―with an intensity that makes them otherworldly.In Daydreams of Angels, O’Neill’s first collection of short stories, she gives free rein to her imaginative gifts. In “Swan Lake for Beginners,” generations of Nureyev clones live out their lives in a grand Soviet experiment. In “The Holy Dove Parade,” a teenage 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, fables, Bible parables―to uncover the deepest truths of family life. Review “When angels make an appearance in literary fiction, they tend to be either ethereal and symbolic or wretched and questing. In her endearingly weird debut story collection, novelist O'Neill offers up celestial creatures who don't fall neatly into either camp-they chain-smoke, they pass out business cards, they're even "sleazy and ridiculous." If you're enticed by this idea, O'Neill's dark fairy tales will be right up your alley. She takes the classic trope of a lost soul in search of salvation and gives it a parade of original twists . . . O'Neill's angels are like the unhinged couple at a cocktail party-they can't stop fighting and making out, and we definitely can't look away. Keep this collection on the nightstand, and you'll be sure to kick your dreamscape up a notch.” ―Kirkus Review“O'Neill's language . . . is what I find so beguiling about her work. Similes blow up the ordinary. Hyperbole extends throughout . . . O'Neill exceeds at inventing a place where magic really happens, where the mundane can become extraordinary.” ―Liz Fischer Greenhill, The Rumpus on The Girl Who Was Saturday Night

When We Lost Our Heads: A Novel

"Every decent friendship comes with a drop of hatred. But that hatred is like honey in the tea. It makes it addictive." 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.

Riverhead Books

“Every decent friendship comes with a drop of hatred. But that hatred is like honey in the tea. It makes it addictive.”\nCharismatic 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.\nTraveling 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.

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