Top

Daydreams of Angels

On sale

2nd April 2015

Price: £8.49

Selected:  ebook / ISBN-13: 9781784291440

Disclosure: If you buy products using the retailer buttons above, we may earn a commission from the retailers you visit.

Original and bewitching rewrites of children’s stories and fairytales set around World War Two, by the Women’s Prize-shortlisted author

A cherub breaks all the rules when he spends one night with a girl on earth.
Snow White and Rose Red forge a unique way to survive the Paris occupation.
A soldier is brought back to life by a toymaker, but he’s not grateful.
And a child begins the story of a Gypsy and a bear, who have to finish it themselves.

These are old stories, but not as you know them. These are set not in the forests of Europe or fantasy worlds, but on the battlefields of World War Two and the wilderness of downtown Montreal.

With her blazing imagination, irreverent humour and arresting prose, Heather O’Neill twists them anew: more magical for their realism, more profound for their darkness; captivating, witty and wicked.

Reviews

Macleans
Magical and inventive
Toronto Star
Strange but irresistible fairy tales for adults . . . O'Neill is a wondrous writer whose clean declarative sentences push the stories forward. She also has an astonishing gift for metaphor
Winnipeg Free Press
Wonderful, heart-catching book of storytelling . . . It is indicative of O'Neill's tendency toward the grittily dreamy that they blend together so deliciously
Kirkus
Takes the classic trope of a lost soul in search of salvation and gives it a parade of original twists . . . O'Neill's dark fairy tales will be right up your alley. Keep this collection on the nightstand, and you'll be sure to kick your dreamscape up a notch
Sunday Times
Like [Angela] Carter, O'Neill subverts her stories with an adult and casually seamy emphasis, and she is relentlessly inventive . . . Never less than entertaining, Daydreams of Angels has an agile intelligence