New Release Books by Emma Donoghue

Around the year 600, three men vow to leave the world behind and set out in a small boat for an island their leader has seen in a dream, with only faith to guide them In seventh-century Ireland, a scholar priest named Artt has a dream in which God tells him to leave the sinful world behind. With two monks--young Trian and old Cormac--he rows down the River Shannon in search of an isolated spot in which to found a monastery. Drifting out into the Atlantic, the three men find the impossibly steep, bare island known today as Skellig Michael. In such a place, what will survival mean?

In Dublin, 1918, a maternity ward at the height of the Great Flu is a small world of work, risk, death, and unlooked-for love, in "Donoghue''s best novel since Room" (Kirkus Reviews). In an Ireland doubly ravaged by war and disease, Nurse Julia Power works at an understaffed hospital in the city center, where expectant mothers who have come down with the terrible new Flu are quarantined together. Into Julia''s regimented world step two outsiders—Doctor Kathleen Lynn, a rumoured Rebel on the run from the police, and a young volunteer helper, Bridie Sweeney. In the darkness and intensity of this tiny ward, over three days, these women change each other''s lives in unexpected ways. They lose patients to this baffling pandemic, but they also shepherd new life into a fearful world. With tireless tenderness and humanity, carers and mothers alike somehow do their impossible work. In The Pull of the Stars, Emma Donoghue once again finds the light in the darkness in this new classic of hope and survival against all odds.

This "soul stirring" novel by the New York Times bestselling author of Room (O Magazine) is one of the New York Post''s best books of the year. Noah Selvaggio is a retired chemistry professor and widower living on the Upper West Side, but born in the South of France. He is days away from his first visit back to Nice since he was a child, bringing with him a handful of puzzling photos he''s discovered from his mother''s wartime years. But he receives a call from social services: Noah is the closest available relative of an eleven-year-old great-nephew he''s never met, who urgently needs someone to look after him. Out of a feeling of obligation, Noah agrees to take Michael along on his trip. Much has changed in this famously charming seaside mecca, still haunted by memories of the Nazi occupation. The unlikely duo, suffering from jet lag and culture shock, bicker about everything from steak frites to screen time. But Noah gradually comes to appreciate the boy''s truculent wit, and Michael''s ease with tech and sharp eye help Noah unearth troubling details about their family''s past. Both come to grasp the risks people in all eras have run for their loved ones, and find they are more akin than they knew. Written with all the tenderness and psychological intensity that made Room an international bestseller, Akin is a funny, heart-wrenching tale of an old man and a boy, born two generations apart, who unpick their painful story and start to write a new one together. "What begins as a larky story of unlikely male bonding turns into an off-center but far richer novel about the unheralded, imperfect heroism of two women." -- New York Times

Kidnapped as a teenage girl, Ma has been locked inside a purpose built room in her captor''s garden for seven years. Her five year old son, Jack, has no concept of the world outside and happily exists inside Room with the help of Ma''s games and his vivid imagination where objects like Rug, Lamp and TV are his only friends. But for Ma the time has come to escape and face their biggest challenge to date: the world outside Room.

The bestselling author of the adult novel Room bursts onto the children''s book scene with this cross between Little Miss Sunshine, Cheaper by the Dozen, and Modern Family. Sumac Lottery is nine years old and the self-proclaimed "good girl" of her (VERY) large, (EXTREMELY) unruly family. And what a family the Lotterys are: four parents, children both adopted and biological, and a menagerie of pets, all living and learning together in a sprawling house called Camelottery. Then one day, the news breaks that one of their grandfathers is suffering from dementia and will be coming to live with them. And not just any grandfather -- the long dormant "Grumps," who fell out with his son so long ago that he hasn''t been part of any of their lives.Suddenly, everything changes. Sumac has to give up her room to make the newcomer feel at home. She tries to be nice, but prickly Grumps clearly disapproves of how the Lotterys live: whole grains, strange vegetables, rescue pets, a multicultural household... He''s worse than just tough to get along with -- Grumps has got to go! But can Sumac help him find a home where he belongs?

In this masterpiece by Emma Donoghue, bestselling author of Room, an English nurse is brought to a small Irish village to observe what appears to be a miracle -- a girl said to have survived without food for month -- and soon finds herself fighting to save the child''s life. Tourists flock to the cabin of eleven-year-old Anna O''Donnell, who believes herself to be living off manna from heaven, and a journalist is sent to cover the sensation. Lib Wright, a veteran of Florence Nightingale''s Crimean campaign, is hired to keep watch over the girl. Written with all the propulsive tension that made Room a huge bestseller, The Wonder works beautifully on many levels -- a tale of two strangers who transform each other''s lives, a powerful psychological thriller, and a story of love pitted against evil. Acclaim for The Wonder: "Deliciously gothic.... Dark and vivid, with complicated characters, this is a novel that lodges itself deep" (USA Today, 3/4 stars) "Heartbreaking and transcendent"(New York Times) "A fable as lean and discomfiting as Anna''s dwindling body.... Donoghue keeps us riveted" (Chicago Tribune) "Donoghue poses powerful questions about faith and belief" (Newsday)

A short story by Emma Donoghue from the collection Reader, I Married Him: Stories inspired by Jane Eyre.

In this sparkling collection of nineteen stories, the bestselling author of Slammerkin returns to contemporary affairs, exposing the private dilemmas that result from some of our most public controversies. A man finds God and finally wants to father a child-only his wife is now forty-two 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 the 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.

The first collection of plays from Booker Prize and Orange Prize finalist and author of international bestseller Room, Emma Donoghue. Contains the plays Kissing the Witch, Don’t Die Wondering, Trespasses, Ladies and Gentlemen, and I Know My Own Heart KISSING THE WITCH Adapted from her book of thirteen revisionist fairy tales of the same name, this play interweaves four classic plots – Beauty and the Beast, Donkeyskin, the Goose Girl, the Little Mermaid – with an invented one about a desperate girl going to a witch for help. Kissing the Witch finds the gritty in the fantastical, and excavates magic to find what’s really going on. TRESPASSES Set over three days in 1661, Trespasses is inspired by the judge’s own account of one of the tiny handful of witch trials that ever took place in Ireland. It asks why a servant girl who fell into fits would have put the blame on an old beggarwoman – but also, more timeless questions about the clashing cultures that have to share a small island country. Trespasses is about faith and superstition, politics and class, sadism and love. LADIES AND GENTLEMEN This play with songs, set mostly in the dressing rooms of busy vaudeville theatres all over North America, was inspired by a real same-sex wedding that took place in Grand Rapids, Michigan, in 1886. It resurrects a ragtag troupe of emigrants - most notably, male impersonator Annie Hindle, ‘a man’s widow and a woman’s widower’, as the tabloids called her. With a light touch, Ladies and Gentleman explores the ways we perform our roles, both on and off stage. I KNOW MY OWN HEART Inspired by the secret coded diaries of Yorkshire gentlewoman Anne Lister, this play subverts all the conventions of Regency romance. Teasing out the entangled lives of mannish, arrogant Lister (nicknamed ''Gentleman Jack'') and three of her many lovers, I Know My Own Heart explores the different choices women made in a time of limits and prohibitions. DON’T DIE WONDERING When a restaurant cook loses her job because of a homophobic customer, she mounts a one-woman picket in protest. The police officer assigned to protect her is her nemesis from schooldays. This one-act comedy, set in a fictional small town, stages a battle between old and new elements of Irish culture.

In this profile, Emma Donoghue tells the story of two eccentric Victorian spinsters: Katherine Bradley (1846-1914) and her niece Edith Cooper (1862-1913); poets and lovers, who wrote together under the name of Michael Field. They wrote eleven volumes of poetry and thirty historical tragedies, but perhaps their best work - richest in emotional honesty and wit - was the diary that the two women shared for a quarter of a century, and these unpublished journals and letters form the basis for the groundbreaking We are Michael Field. The Michaels lived in a contradictory world of inherited wealth and terrible illness, silly nicknames and religious crises. They preferred men to women, and yet their greatest devotion was saved for their dog. Snobbish, arrogant eccentrics who faced bereavement and death with great courage, the Michaels never lost their appetite for life or their passion for each other.

From the author of the worldwide bestseller Room: "Her greatest achievement yet...Emma Donoghue shows more than range with Frog Music -- she shows genius."- Darin Strauss, author of Half a Life. Summer of 1876: San Francisco is in the fierce grip of a record-breaking heat wave and a smallpox epidemic. Through the window of a railroad saloon, a young woman named Jenny Bonnet is shot dead. The survivor, her friend Blanche Beunon, is a French burlesque dancer. Over the next three days, she will risk everything to bring Jenny''s murderer to justice -- if he doesn''t track her down first. The story Blanche struggles to piece together is one of free-love bohemians, desperate paupers, and arrogant millionaires; of jealous men, icy women, and damaged children. It''s the secret life of Jenny herself, a notorious character who breaks the law every morning by getting dressed: a charmer as slippery as the frogs she hunts. In thrilling, cinematic style, Frog Music digs up a long-forgotten, never-solved crime. Full of songs that migrated across the world, Emma Donoghue''s lyrical tale of love and bloodshed among lowlifes captures the pulse of a boomtown like no other.

In the late ’70s, convent school teenagers Pen O’Grady and Cara Wall fall in love. They prove themselves to be up to the challenge of a relationship deemed unacceptable in Catholic Ireland—until Cara dies in a car accident. Hood is a bittersweet, complicated love story.

Passions Between Women looks at stories of lesbian desires, acts and identities from the Restoration to the beginning of the nineteenth century. Far from being invisible, the figure of the woman who felt passion for women in this period was a subject of confusion and contradiction: she could be put in a freak show as a ''hermaphrodite'', denounced as a ''tribade'' or ''lesbian'', revered as a ''romantic friend'', jailed as a ''female husband'' or gossiped about as a ''woman-lover'', ''tommy'' or ''Sapphist''. Through an examination of a wealth of new medical, legal and erotic source material, together with re-readings of classics of English literature, Emma Donoghue uncovers the astonishing range of lesbian and bisexual identities described in British texts between 1668 and 1801. Female pirates and spiritual mentors, chambermaids and queens, poets and prostitutes, country idylls and whipping clubs all take their place in an intriguing panorama of lesbian lives and loves. ''Controversial, erotic and radical, Emma Donoghue''s lesbian voyage of exploration outlines an astonishing spectrum of gender rebellion which creates a new map of eighteenth-century sexual territories and identities.'' Patricia Duncker

An ad in the students’ union—“2 females seek flatmate. No bigots”—leads Maria to a home with warm Ruth and wickedly funny Jael. But one day, something Maria glimpses by accident forces her to question everything she thought she knew.

Based on the details of a scandalous divorce case that gripped England in 1864, The Sealed Letter is a provocative historical drama that is strangely relevant to modern issues surrounding women, marriage, rights and roles. Miss Emily “Fido” Faithfull is a “woman of business” and a spinster pioneer of the British women’s movement, independent of mind but naively trusting of heart. Distracted from her beloved cause by the sudden return of her once-dear friend, the unhappily wed Helen Codrington, Fido is swept up in the intimate details of Helen’s failing marriage to the stodgy Admiral Harry Codrington. What begins as a loyal effort to help a friend explodes into a courtroom drama more sensational than any Hollywood tabloid could invent—with stained clothing, accusations of adultery, counterclaims of rape and a mysterious letter that could destroy more than one life. HarperCollins is proud to deliver Emma Donoghue’s internationally celebrated work into the hands of discerning fiction readers in this, her first Canadian publication. The Sealed Letter is the perfect book to mark this milestone event—a masterpiece that brings the force of a life that changed our world into captivating view.

Jack is five. He lives in a single, locked room with his Ma. Room by Emma Donoghue is an extraordinarily powerful story of a mother and child kept in isolation, and the desire for, and price of, freedom.

Emma Donoghue, the celebrated author of Room, brings her considerable talents to the short-story genre with these two moving collections. Touchy Subjects 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. Astray Gold miner. Counterfeiter. Slave. Dishwasher. Prostitute. Attorney. Sculptor. Mercenary. Elephant. Corpse. The colourful, fascinating characters that roam the pages of Emma Donoghue’s stories have all gone astray. They cross other borders, too: those of race, law, sex and sanity. They travel for love or money, incognito or under duress.