Dear Reader

A fabulous, sharply funny and heartbreaking love letter to Wuthering Heights and books, Dear Reader is about finding your people – on the page and in the world.

And in this case those are the people who love reading, words and books. This book will make every fan of Wuthering Heights scamper back to curl up with their old copies, inspire anyone who has wondered what all the fuss to read it, and everyone else start humming Kate Bush doing Heathcliff – or just thinking about Heathcliff ...

Set over the course of one day, Dear Reader is the story of an English literature teacher who abruptly disappears and the student who follows in search of her, using a well-thumbed and marked Wuthering Heights as her guide. When her favourite teacher disappears, Flannery knows something is wrong. She finds Miss Sweeney’s copy of Wuthering Heights, which transforms into a sort of roadmap, and so she does something very un-Flannery-like: she skips school and sets out for Manhattan, with the book as her guide. There, she meets a tall handsome boy called Heath who seems to have stepped from the pages of Bronte’s novel.

With delicious wit and heart, Mary O’Connell has crafted a love letter to reading, to the books that make us who we are, and to the teachers who help us discover them.

About the Author

Mary O’Connell is a graduate of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop and the author of the short story collection, Living With Saints, and a novel, The Sharp Time. Her short fiction and essays have appeared in several leading literary magazines, and she is the recipient of a James Michener Fellowship and a Chicago Tribune Nelson Algren Award. She lives in Kansas.