When We Lost Our Heads: A Novel

by Heather O'Neill

Overview

“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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780593422915
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	02/07/2023
Pages:	448
Sales rank:	42,417
Product dimensions:	5.10(w) x 7.80(h) x 1.20(d)

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.

Editorial Reviews

"This novel has everything...opulence, whimsy, sugar barons, brothels, factories, revolution, and an intense friendship that forces both participants to straddle darkness and light while clinging to one another for dear life." —Literary Hub

"A twisted, perverse story that's difficult to put down...you'll be desperate to know what [the characters] do next." —Buzzfeed

"Delightful...The plot satisfies with twists and turns to the end, but it’s the audaciousness of spirit emboldening most of [O'Neill's] female characters that makes this novel shine." —New York Journal of Books

“These perversely fascinating characters are filled with guile and bile and many things vile, and even though it’s virtually a certainty that they are star-crossed, it’s impossible to tear one’s gaze away.” —BookPage

“O’Neill’s sharp descriptions and her prose’s archaic slant successfully immerse readers in the period...this distinctive, character-driven story is delightfully perverse.” —Publishers Weekly

"O’Neill uses evocative descriptions and near-constant tension to carry this dark almost-fairy-tale to anunexpected conclusion." —Booklist

“With irreverence and charm, O’Neill takes us into the vivid worlds of Sadie and Marie, unlikely friends who find themselves in the thrall of shared dark passions, threatening to destroy all they have come to know. When We Lost Our Heads is a lovely, uncanny take on the historical novel, told with O’Neill’s trademark wit and empathy for human foibles.” —Esi Edugyan, author of Washington Black  

“A dazzling, delicious dream…penned with equal parts arsenic-laced icing and blood. There are marvels and dark delights on every page as O’Neill masterfully unfurls the lifelong love affair of Sadie and Marie, whose tale is illuminated by the triumphs of female desire over the crushing designs of men. The spell this novel casts is irresistible.” —Mona Awad, author of All’s Well
 
“I am struggling to say how much I loved this book…It is a beautiful, alarming, outraged, outrageous, dancing, laughing, shrieking, bellowing, howling, gobbling piece of wonder. What a joy!” —Edward Carey, author of The Swallowed Man

From the Publisher

12/13/2021

A corrosive friendship between two powerful women has profound implications in this Victorian epic from O’Neill (The Lonely Hearts Hotel). In 1873, Montreal sugar factory heiress Marie Antoine and her intelligent, macabre friend Sadie Arnett accidentally kill Marie’s maid Agatha during a pretend duel. Sadie’s politically ambitious family then ships her off to a repressive school in England, where she discovers her calling in writing pornographic stories. Marie and Sadie reunite nine years later, but their friendship fizzles. Sadie moves into a brothel after her family discovers her writing, and Marie implements brutal cost-cutting measures at the plant following her father’s death, sparking animosity from her half-sister, Agatha’s illegitimate daughter Mary. George, a gender nonconforming midwife, shares Mary’s outrage at Marie and hopes to cement a relationship with Sadie. After George publishes Sadie’s erotica, which features thinly veiled versions of Marie, Marie bribes Sadie’s way out of obscenity charges and the two women embark on a sexual relationship, until their lavish lifestyle and abuses of power make them targets in a class revolt. While the uprising subsumes the final act in an abrupt shift, O’Neill’s sharp descriptions and her prose’s archaic slant successfully immerse readers in the period. It’s a little bumpy, but overall this distinctive, character-driven story is delightfully perverse. (Feb.)

Publishers Weekly

09/01/2021

At age 12, bubbly Marie Antoine rules over the children of the glittering 19th-century Montreal neighborhood called Golden Mile until sly-eyed, decidedly unbubbly Sadie Arnett moves in. The two girls bond obsessively yet remain a combustible, even dangerous mix, oscillating between closeness and absence into adulthood as Marie inherits her father's sugar empire and Sadie becomes absorbed in working-class revolution. From the author of the Orange Prize-nominated Lullabies for Little Criminals.

Library Journal

2021-11-17
The all-consuming friendship of two upper-class girls in 19th-century Montreal.

Marie Antoine and Sadie Arnett grow up in the Golden Mile, a wealthy neighborhood where Marie is the daughter of the richest man in the city while Sadie’s family struggles to keep up appearances. Psychopathic Sadie easily manipulates the spoiled Marie Antoine. Sadie’s mother recognizes this darkness in her daughter and abandons her to it: “Sadie would pretend to have feelings to get what she wanted. That was how manipulative Sadie was.” The girls confide in each other, push the limits of acceptable behavior, and are “delighted by their indecency.” Yet theirs isn’t a loving friendship. They’re competitive rivals: “Every decent friendship comes with a drop of hatred. But that hatred is like honey in the tea. It makes it addictive.” When they accidentally murder a maid while pretending at a duel, Sadie is sent overseas. A strict boarding school shapes her identity, and her youthful perversions blossom. The first half of the book is a slow build, concentrating more on character development than action. Sadie returns from boarding school as an adult and takes up residence in a whorehouse in the Squalid Mile, a foil to the girls’ upper-class neighborhood. Marie inherits her father’s sugar factory and becomes a coldhearted boss. In its second half, the book takes on too many ideas without bringing them together. A plotline involving a trans character’s search for identity is given surface-level treatment. Sadie releases a sadistic roman à clef about “the violent delight of female desire,” and women across the city awaken to either their sexual power or their need for safe working conditions, but not both. Marie and Sadie lock themselves away from the world, while a pretender to Marie’s throne plots her demise. Ideas about girl power, friendship, gender identity, class, sexual sadism, mistaken identity, and the dehumanizing nature of the Industrial Revolution compete for center stage in this overlong tale with a predictable twist ending.

There are insightful observations about friendship, but disconnected ideas gum up the works.

Kirkus Reviews