Canada Reads champion Heather O'Neill publishing next novel in fall 2024
Lucy Mann | CBC Books | Posted: March 14, 2024 1:56 PM | Last Updated: March 14
The Capital of Dreams will be available Sept. 10, 2024, read an excerpt now
Heather O'Neill is back with a new book, The Capital of Dreams. O'Neill's new novel, and her first set outside of Montreal, is coming out this fall.
The Capital of Dreams is a dark fairytale set in a small European country during a period of war. Fourteen-year-old Sofia is the daughter of the revered writer, Clara Bottom. When their country is invaded, Clara bundles Sofia onto the last train evacuating children out of the city. Clara gives her daughter her latest manuscript to smuggle to safety.
When the children's train stops in the middle of the forest, Sofia senses they are in danger. She manages to escape, but loses her mother's beloved manuscript. Soon Sofia finds herself alone in a country at war on an epic journey to find all that she has lost.
The Capital of Dreams will be available on Sept. 10, 2024.
Heather O'Neill is a novelist, short story writer and essayist from Montreal. She won Canada Reads 2024, championing The Future by Catherine Leroux, translated by Susan Ouriou. O'Neill is the first person to win Canada Reads as both an author and a contender. Her debut novel Lullabies for Little Criminals won Canada Reads 2007 when it was defended by musician John K. Samson.
WATCH | Heather O'Neill defends The Future on Canada Reads:
O'Neill was also the first back-to-back finalist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize for The Girl Who Was Saturday Night in 2014 and her short story collection Daydreams of Angels in 2015. Her books also include the novels When We Lost Our Heads and The Lonely Hearts Hotel.
"This was actually the book I wanted to write after Lullabies for Little Criminals," O'Neill said to CBC Books. "Instead I wrote a short story in which Sofia appeared. Sometimes my novels, they come to me in images. And I had an image of this girl on the back of a truck and she was holding an animal in her lap. She was a child that was so completely lost. So I had that little scene in my head and it kind of haunted me for years.
"I was working on it for a long time and then I began playing with it more and more and it started coming back. Then about five and a half years ago I was in Central Europe at a residency and I started thinking about the girl again, and the whole texture of it came to me and I began writing The Capital of Dreams."
O'Neill's own father and his brothers had enlisted in the Second World War and when she asked them for stories about their experiences as a child, she said they would speak to her about it in fairy tales and riddles.
"Stories have always been important in my life. When I was about 12 years old, I discovered the works of Samuel Beckett. And his absurdist, funny, fragmented, philosophical way of speaking connected with me immediately. I realize now it was because I didn't have any language to articulate the trauma of surviving in an abusive home with that same father who told me fairy tales about the war."
I didn't have any language to articulate the trauma of surviving in an abusive home with that same father who told me fairy tales about the war. - Heather O'Neill
"I had those memories in my mind as I was traveling and I wanted to create a child and their animal companion who spoke in the manner of absurdist thinkers. I wanted their dialogue to be like a play that responded to living in a time of darkness, in this case, war.
"I also, ultimately, wanted to talk about how art is erased and artists murdered during occupations, in order to destroy a people. I wanted to show the power of art, and the role of writing for a people becoming free."
The Capital of Dreams also marks the first time that O'Neill created the character of a mother in one of her novels.
"It was so hard for me to write mothers before and all of a sudden I created this mother and she's like the mother of mothers! I loved writing about a woman who had all these accomplishments. I think [before] I didn't understand yet what it was to be middle-aged and having something under your belt and how rewarding it is. Sofia's mother takes up so much space — in a wonderful way."
LISTEN | Heather O'Neill and Catherine Leroux discuss winning Canada Reads:
O'Neill told CBC Books about how her own struggle with reconciling the idea of being an artist and a mother inspired her. "I was pondering something Simone de Beauvoir once said, which was that a woman could not be a mother and an existentialist.
"I have struggled a great deal with reconciling the idea of being an artist and a mother. So I thought, what if Simone de Beauvoir had a little girl. How would she reconcile her philosophy with having a child? How would the child feel about it?"
I have struggled a great deal with reconciling the idea of being an artist and a mother. - Heather O'Neill
"I am so thrilled The Capital of Dreams is coming out. It has been living in my psyche for so long. It probably began even before the war stories, as a seed when I read my first poem in a Mother Goose anthology, and I wondered, how did that make me feel so powerful?
"How is it that literature speaks from the depths of ourselves and gives us the language to make us able to imagine ourselves as important beings, worthy of freedom? And I want to take the reader on this journey of heartbreak and beauty with me."
You can read an excerpt from The Capital of Dreams below.
To Sofia's delight, her mother announced they were going to the country to visit her grandmother, who still resided in the large rural childhood estate. Sofia jumped up and grabbed her book of folk tales to read in the car.
"I wish you would read something more modern," Clara said, looking at the book.
"I wish you would not criticize everything I do."
"Good grief. You've become so contrary since the war. But I hear all the children are going quite mad. It ages children 10 years."
Clara often said she'd had high hopes for Sofia because she had begun to read so early. But then, unfortunately, she had never developed as a reader.
Clara often said she'd had high hopes for Sofia because she had begun to read so early.
That she was reading a children's book was particularly irksome. Clara liked to declare that she began reading serious philosophers when she was 14 years old.
"Oh, Sofia, you can't always read children's books for the rest of your life. It will break my heart if you don't grow as a reader. There's so much out there for you to read and discover. Talking rabbits are a waste of time. They are there to amuse children. But they can't really teach you about the world. The modern world, Sofia! Don't you want to read books by living writers? With new ideas? Rational ideas? It's through reading that I became an adult. You can't learn anything in your enchanted forests."
Throughout this entire diatribe, Sofia looked at her mother with a blank expression on her face. When she saw that her mother had finished what she was going to say, she calmly cast her eyes back to the pages of her book and continued to read it. She would continue to read, even were she to grow carsick.
She liked that her mother disapproved of this book. It was a way for her to feel as if her reading had nothing at all to do with her mother. Which was not an easy thing to do, considering how attached her mother was to everything literary in the country.
How could Sofia look at books, any pile of books, and not feel a certain resentment towards them?
And in any case, Clara was wrong. Because Sofia had evolved as a reader. It was simply that she liked to read the same book over and over. When you reread a book multiple times, you began to find secrets in the text. You can dip your toe in the book and feel the delightful cold of the subtext.
When you reread a book multiple times, you began to find secrets in the text.
Whenever she started a new book, it would seem like she was in a stranger's house. She was in an unfamiliar world. And she felt horribly uncomfortable.
She rather liked that no one else she knew had read the book of folk tales. It had gone out of fashion. She liked the girls she met there. She felt connected to them. She was the girl in the stories.
You could prevail in this world, but you had to have pluck. She would open the book to find herself dressed in rags. And in a forest all alone. She was responsible for herself. Her family had caused her to be in her perilous state.
Mothers were never to be trusted. Many of the mothers in the tales had to give their daughters away. They had gone into debt. When their children were born, they were always spoken for. The mothers handed over their babies for gambling debts, for groceries, for clothes. For recipes and maps and keys.
Young girls who had been sent out into the world without a coin in their purse should not be judged for what they had to trade. The only thing they had were their babies.
Mothers were never to be trusted.
These were the mothers whose intentions were good. The other mothers in the stories were wicked. They were mothers who lived for infanticide. They left their children in the woods for beasts to rip apart. They left them on cliffs for the weather to kill. They gave them to pirates with instructions to leave them in the sea. They gave them to hunters to slay as though they were beasts. They handed them over to travelling salesmen and told them to take them to the far reaches of the earth to abandon them.
It was then the little girl wandered around by herself. She met her true family. She encountered a blind child who could put people to sleep for a hundred years when she sang. She met a three-legged dog that was in love with a boy who beat him with a stick. But how can anyone control who they fall in love with? She met a donkey that could tell the future. But he could only foretell bad events. So he had been tied to a tree to keep him from walking up to women and telling them which of their children would never reach old age.
Excerpted from The Capital of Dreams by Heather O'Neill © 2024. Published by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd. Cover design by Zeena Baybayan.