Lullabies for Little Criminals

HarperCollinsCanada is proud to share with you this collection of HarperCollins Canadian Classics, featuring the master works of some of the finest writers in the country that reveal to us essential truths about the way we live.

Heather O’Neill’s heartbreaking and wholly original debut novel follows a young girl fighting to preserve a bruised innocence on the feral streets of a big city

Baby, all of thirteen years old, is lost in the gangly, coltish moment between childhood and the strange temptations of the adult world. Her mother is dead; her father, Jules, is scarcely more than a child himself. Baby knows that “chocolate milk” is Jules’ slang for heroin and sees a lot more of that in her house than the real thing. But she takes vivid delight in the scrappy bits of happiness and beauty that find their way to her, and moves through the threat of the streets as if she’s been choreographed in a dance.

Soon, though, a hazard emerges that is bigger than even her hard-won survival skills can handle. Alphonse, the local pimp, has his eye on her for his new girl—and what the johns don’t take he covets for himself. If Baby cannot learn to become her own salvation, his dark world threatens to claim her, body and soul.

A novel of extraordinary prescience and power, a subtly understated yet searingly effective story of a young life on the streets—and the strength, wits, and luck necessary for survival.

“O’Neill is a tragicomedienne par excellence…. You will not want to miss this tender depiction of some very mean streets.” - Montreal Review of Books