Joel Thomas Hynes' favourite Canadian book of 2017 is The Lonely Hearts Hotel by Heather O'Neill
Happy holidays! CBC Books asked authors to share their favourite books of 2017. We will be publishing these recommendations throughout December.
Joel Thomas Hynes selected The Lonely Hearts Hotel by Heather O'Neill.
"At the time of this writing, I'm smack in the middle of Heather O'Neill's latest novel The Lonely Hearts Hotel. I've been waiting to read it for a few months now, saving it up. I knew going in, based on my mad love for The Girl Who Was Saturday Night and Lullabies for Little Criminals, that it was going to be a wild and dreamy, perverse and heartbreaking ride. And so it is. I basically want to hide away with it, drop out of the hustle for a few days and devour it. It's an intense, dazzling and wickedly comic novel that makes me want to strike out with crazed abandon in search of magic and madness in Old Montreal."
Joel Thomas Hynes won the 2017 Governor General's Literary Award for fiction for his novel We'll All Be Burnt in Our Beds Some Night.