A man finds God and finally wants to father a child-only his wife is now forty-three years old. A coach's son discovers his sexuality on the football field. A roommate's bizarre secret liberates a repressed young woman. From the unforeseen consequences of a polite social lie to the turmoil caused by a single hair on a woman's chin, Donoghue dramatizes the seemingly small acts upon which our lives often turn. Many of these stories involve animals and what they mean to us, or babies and whether to have them; some replay Biblical plots in modern contexts. With characters old, young, straight, gay and simply confused, Donoghue dazzles with her range and her ability to touch lightly but delve deeply into the human condition.
'All of Donoghue's stories are lucid and well paced...written over a number of years, these stories demonstrate considerable versatility...It's evident she likes her characters, and you probably will too.' --Tibor Fischer New York Times
Author
About Emma Donoghue
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.
