Mary O'Connell

“Imaginative, exhilarating, genre-bending, and one of the best YA novels of the year.” —BookRiot “An audacious tale. Like much classic literature and like growing up, reading this immersive novel is all about the experience.” —The Horn Book An IndieNext Pick! Gilmore Girls meets Wuthering Heights in Mary O'Connell's Dear Reader, a whip-smart, poignant, modern-day take on Emily Brontë’s classic novel. For seventeen-year-old Flannery Fields, the only respite from the plaid-skirted mean girls at Sacred Heart High School is her beloved teacher Miss Sweeney’s AP English class. But when Miss Sweeney doesn't show up to teach Flannery's favorite book, Wuthering Heights, leaving behind her purse, Flannery knows something is wrong. The police are called, and Flannery gives them everything—except Miss Sweeney's copy of Wuthering Heights. This she holds onto. And good thing she does, because when she opens it, it has somehow transformed into Miss Sweeney's real-time diary. It seems Miss Sweeney is in New York City—and she's in trouble. So Flannery does something very unFlannery-like: she skips school and sets out for Manhattan, with the book as her guide. But as soon as she arrives, she meets a boy named Heath. Heath is British, on a gap year, incredibly smart—yet he's never heard of Albert Einstein or Anne Frank. In fact, Flannery can't help thinking that he seems to have stepped from the pages of Brontë's novel. Could it be that Flannery is spending this topsy-turvy day with her ultimate fictional romantic hero, Heathcliff, reborn in the twenty-first century?

A Novel

Dear Reader

In the week following her mother's death in a freak accident, eighteen-year-old Sandanista Jones finds small measures of happiness even as she fantasizes about an act of revenge against an abusive teacher at her high school.

The Sharp Time

In 19th century Ireland, a new crop failure threatened the land and its people. This time round, a radical idea began to take hold: that famine was neither divine nor natural in origin but a political event, based on unequal power relations.

A Novel of Australia and Ireland

The Country of Our Dreams

Novel based on the life of the medieval Benedictine nun, healer, musician, teacher and visionary, Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179), and focusing on the period 1148-1153. Includes notes on the text, references and select bibliography. Author is a historian completing a PhD on 20th-century Australian visionary, Eileen O'Connor.

Hildegard of Bingen, a Medieval Romance

The King's Daughter

A collection of stories explores the role of Catholicism in the lives of young women as they search for love and balance in the real world.

Mary O'Connell

About

Books

Join the club