Daydreams of Angels

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 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.