When We Lost Our Heads: A Novel

Heather O'Neill

Penguin, Feb 8, 2022 - Fiction - 448 pages

“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.

What people are saying

LibraryThing Review

User Review  - gypsysmom - LibraryThing

I have to say I was rather disappointed in this effort from Heather O'Neill. I recommended it to my book club on the strength of her other books especially Lullabies for Little Criminals and The ...

LibraryThing Review

User Review  - raidergirl3 - LibraryThing

I loved the French Revolution parallels (even though I know so little about French Revolution), I loved the feminism, I loved the writing, and I loved twists and turns that I did not see coming. Let them eat cake indeed.

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.

Bibliographic information

• Title: When We Lost Our Heads: A Novel
• Author: Heather O'Neill
• Publisher: Penguin, 2022
• ISBN: 0593422902, 9780593422908
• Length: 448 pages
• Subjects: Fiction / Friendship; Fiction / Historical / General; Fiction / Literary