Aug 21, 2018 | 272 Pages
Aug 21, 2018 | 549 Minutes
“A fierce exploration of memory and zeitgeist . . . Heartbreaker is a darkly comedic weirdo of a book that pulls the string of nostalgia from one side while unraveling it from the other.”—The Paris Review
“This is a book like no other. It’s eerie, it’s cult-y, it’s so very exciting, and I never wanted it to end.”—Buzzfeed, Best Books of Fall 2018
“One of the best surprises of 2018. A small rural town, a mother disappeared, a daughter left behind, secrets peeled away in layers. Weird, deeply creepy, written in punchy prose that rolls along and always leaves you wanting more.”—San Francisco Chronicle
“Claudia Dey renders 1985 in perfectly crimped, shoulder-padded detail. Fifteen-year-old Pony Darlene Fontaine has lived her entire life in the ‘territory,’ an isolated town founded decades earlier by an enigmatic cult leader and run on a sinister economic resource. . . . Come for the Shyamalanian premise. Stay for the hard-rock soundtrack.”—Chicago Tribune
“Told from the perspectives of Pony, a dog, and a teenage boy, this book shows the magic of Dey’s imagination.”—The Millions
“Disturbed, seductive and thrilling.”—i-D Vice
“It’s not the plot, the characters, or even the premise that makes this novel so extraordinary—it’s the voice, which is so utterly unusual and authentic as to seem like it’s really coming from a world of total isolation. . . . Dey strips away the trappings of modernity to show what humans truly are at base, while eschewing the usual cult narrative. The result is a whole-cloth, word-for-word triumph of imagination.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“Masterful, beautiful.”—The Rumpus
“What begins as a simple mystery—a daughter attempting to investigate the sudden disappearance of her mother—turns into a much stranger and more engrossing tale. . . . Dey deepens this dark fantasy through the imaginatively detailed, keen observations of teen narrator Pony Darlene Fontaine, who muses about her place amid this blank landscape while anchoring the proceedings with sly pop-culture references. Dey’s rich prose drives the story with poetic acuteness.”—LA Weekly
“A mashup of Stranger Things and Martha Marcy May Marlene.”—The Hollywood Reporter
“Haunting . . . lyrical . . . The most original novel I’ve read in some time.”—Electric Lit
“Wildly imaginative and poetic, Claudia Dey’s Heartbreaker is one of the year’s most consistently surprising books.”—Largehearted Boy
“A dark star of a book, glittering with mordant humor and astonishing, seductive strangeness and grace. I am a giant fan of Claudia Dey’s wild brain.”—Lauren Groff, author of Fates and Furies
“Heartbreaker gave me chills all the way through. It is deeply original—in its wildness, its structure, its wisdom, and its world. It convinced me that the deepest of human (and animal) urges is the pull to find one’s true home—which lies in the hearts of just a few others. I floated in the perfection of its ending. I loved this novel’s shining sensitivity. I loved its every page.”—Sheila Heti, author of Motherhood and How Should a Person Be?
