One of our Great Reads you may have missed in 2011.

A 2012 World Book Night selection.

Winner of the Galaxy Paperback of the Year Award 2011.

This was shortlisted for the Man Booker prize but I believed at the time it would never win for it is far too commercial. It’s about a five-year old boy who was born in captivity and knows nothing beyond the room he and his mother live in. Told in his voice it is an extraordinary achievement, very well thought out, highly intriguing and unexpectedly sad.

Shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction 2011.

Winner of the Orange Youth Panel Prize 2011.

Featured on The Book Show on Sky Arts on 7 April 2011.

Viewers of The TV Book Club have voted Room their favourite Spring read.

Featured on The TV Book Club on More4 on 16 Jan 2011.

Winner of the Hughes & Hughes Novel of the Year Award 2010.

Shortlisted for the Galaxy International Author of the Year 2010.

Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2010.

Comparison: Unique, like The Time Traveler’s Wife, The Lovely Bones or The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time.

Comparison: Daniel Clay, Ray Robinson, John Boyne
For more see our Author 'Like for Like' recommendation system
 

Synopsis

It's Jack's birthday, and he's excited about turning five. Jack lives with his Ma in Room, which has a locked door and a skylight, and measures 11 feet by 11 feet. He loves watching TV, and the cartoon characters he calls friends, but he knows that nothing he sees on screen is truly real - only him, Ma and the things in Room. Until the day Ma admits that there's a world outside ...Told in Jack's voice, Room is the story of a mother and son whose love lets them survive the impossible. Unsentimental and sometimes funny, devastating yet uplifting, Room is a novel like no other.

Reviews

'Emma Donoghue's writing is superb alchemy, changing innocence into horror and horror into tenderness. Room is a book to read in one sitting. When it's over you look up: the world looks the same but you are somehow different and that feeling lingers for days' - Audrey Niffenegger

'Room is one of the most profoundly affecting books I've read in a long time. Jack moved me greatly. His voice, his story, his innocence, his love for Ma combine to create something very unusual and, I think, something very important ... Room deserves to reach the widest possible audience' - John Boyne

'I loved Room. Such incredible imagination, and dazzling use of language. And with all this, an entirely credible, endearing little boy. It's unlike anything I've ever read before' - Anita Shreve

This book will break your heart . . . It is the most vivid, radiant and beautiful expression of maternal love I have ever read’ Irish Times

‘Startlingly original and moving . . . Endearing and as utterly compelling as THE LOVELY BONES’ Scotsman

‘I’ve never read a more heart-burstingly, gut wrenchingly compassionate novel . . . As for sweet, bright, funny Jack, I wanted to scoop him up out of the novel and never let him go’ Daily Mail

‘This is a truly remarkable novel. It presents an utterly unique way to talk about love, all the while giving us a fresh, expansive eye on the world in which we live’ New York Times Book Review

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About the Author

Emma Donoghue was born in Ireland in 1969 and lived in England before moving to Canada. Emma writes fiction (including the bestselling Slammerkin), drama for stage and radio, and literary history; Room is her seventh novel. Some of the places she found her inspiration : Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719), feralchildren.com, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006), Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh (1856), John Fowles’s The Collector (1963), Anne Frank’s Diary (1947), Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), Terminator 2 : Judgment Day (1991), The Jail Diary of Albie Sachs (1966), but above all in conversation with my five-year-old son. More books by this author Author 'Like for Like' recommendation