Most Popular Books by Emma Donoghue

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.

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.

Thirteen tales are unspun from the deeply familiar, and woven anew into a collection of fairy tales that wind back through time. Acclaimed Irish author Emma Donoghue reveals heroines young and old in unexpected alliances--sometimes treacherous, sometimes erotic, but always courageous. Told with luminous voices that shimmer with sensuality and truth, these age-old characters shed their antiquated cloaks to travel a seductive new landscape, radiantly transformed.Cinderella forsakes the handsome prince and runs off with the fairy godmother; Beauty discovers the Beast behind the mask is not so very different from the face she sees in the mirror; Snow White is awakened from slumber by the bittersweet fruit of an unnamed desire. Acclaimed writer Emma Donoghue spins new tales out of old in a magical web of thirteen interconnected stories about power and transformation and choosing one''s own path in the world. In these fairy tales, women young and old tell their own stories of love and hate, honor and revenge, passion and deception. Using the intricate patterns and oral rhythms of traditional fairy tales, Emma Donoghue wraps age-old characters in a dazzling new skin. 2000 List of Popular Paperbacks for YA

Based on a scandalous divorce case that gripped England in 1864, "The Sealed Letter" is a riveting, provocative drama of friends, lovers, and divorce, Victorian style.

“A wrenching love story” (Chris Bohjalian, The Washington Post) based on the true story of two girls who fall secretly, deeply, and dangerously in love at boarding school in 19th century York, from the bestselling author of Room and The Wonder. Drawing on years of investigation and Anne Lister’s five-million-word secret journal, Learned by Heart is the long-buried love story of Eliza Raine, an orphan heiress banished from India to England at age six, and Anne Lister, a brilliant, troublesome tomboy, who meet at the Manor School for young ladies in York in 1805 when they are both fourteen. Emotionally intense, psychologically compelling, and deeply researched, Learned by Heart is an extraordinary work of fiction by one of the world’s greatest storytellers. Full of passion and heartbreak, the tangled lives of Anne Lister and Eliza Raine form a love story for the ages.

Inspired by a teenage girl who murdered her mistress in 1763 because she "longed for fine clothes", "Slammerkin" is the bestselling classic story of a lower-class Roxana, a female Tom Jones.

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

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.

An "engaging . . . entertaining journey," Landing explores the pleasures and sorrows of long-distance love in the digital age ( The New York Times Book Review). Síle is a stylish citizen of the new Dublin, a veteran flight attendant who''s traveled the world. Jude is a twenty-five-year-old archivist, stubbornly attached to Ireland, Ontario, the tiny town in which she was born and raised. When Jude meets Síle on her first transatlantic plane trip, the spark between them is instant. After a coffee shared at Heathrow Airport, both women return to their lives—but neither can forget their encounter. Over the next year, Jude and Síle connect through emails, phone calls, letters, and the occasional visit. But no matter how passionate, every long-distance relationship comes to a crossroads, because you can''t have a happily ever after when the one you love is a world apart . . . "[Donoghue] explores with a light, sure touch the subject of desire across distances of various kinds: generational, cultural, even spiritual." — The New York Times Book Review "[A] charming tale." — Kirkus Reviews

NATIONAL BESTSELLER From the bestselling and “soul-stirring” (Oprah Daily) author of Room, a sweeping historical “nail-biter” (People) of a novel about the infamous 1895 disaster at the Paris Montparnasse train station. Based on an 1895 disaster that went down in history when it was captured in a series of surreal, extraordinary photographs, The Paris Express is a propulsive novel set on a train packed with a fascinating cast of characters who hail from as close as Brittany and as far as Russia, Ireland, Algeria, Pennsylvania, and Cambodia. Members of parliament hurry back to Paris to vote; a medical student suspects a girl may be dying; a secretary tries to convince her boss of the potential of moving pictures; two of the train’s crew build a life away from their wives; a young anarchist makes a terrifying plan, and much more. From an author whose “writing is superb alchemy” (Audrey Niffenegger, New York Times bestselling author), The Paris Express is an evocative masterpiece that effortlessly captures the politics, glamour, chaos, and speed that marked the end of the 19th century.

From the New York Times bestselling author of Room, a young French burlesque dancer living in San Francisco is ready to risk anything in order to solve her friend’s murder—but only if the killer doesn’t get her first. 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. "Her greatest achievement yet . . . Emma Donoghue shows more than range with Frog Music—she shows genius." —Darin Strauss, author of Half a Life.

Emma Donoghue vividly brings to life stories inspired by her discoveries of fascinating, hidden scraps of the past. Here an engraving of a woman giving birth to rabbits, a plague ballad, surgical case notes, theological pamphlets, and an articulated skeleton are ingeniously fleshed out into rollicking, full-bodied fictions. Whether she''s spinning the tale of an English soldier tricked into marrying a dowdy spinster, a Victorian surgeon''s attempts to "improve" women, a seventeenth-century Irish countess who ran away to Italy disguised as a man, or an "undead" murderess returning for the maid she left behind to be executed in her place, Emma Donoghue brings to her tales a colorful, elegant prose filled with the sights and smells and sounds of the period. She summons the ghosts of those men and women who counted for nothing in their own day and brings them to unforgettable life in fiction.

In this beautiful story of adventure and survival from the New York Times bestselling author of Room, three men vow to leave the world behind them as they 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 and priest called Artt has a dream telling him to leave the sinful world behind. Taking two monks—young Trian and old Cormac—he rows down the river Shannon in search of an isolated spot on which to found a monastery. Drifting out into the Atlantic, the three men find an impossibly steep, bare island inhabited by tens of thousands of birds, and claim it for God. In such a place, what will survival mean?

Now a Netflix film starring Florence Pugh: In this “old-school page turner” (Stephen King, New York Times Book Review) by the 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 months—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)

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?

From a writer of astonishing versatility and erudition, the much-admired literary critic, novelist, short-story writer, and scholar (“Dazzling”—The Washington Post; “One of those rare writers who seems to be able to work on any register, any time, any atmosphere, and make it her own” —The Observer), a book that explores the little-known literary tradition of love between women in Western literature, from Chaucer and Shakespeare to Charlotte Brontë, Dickens, Agatha Christie, and many more. Emma Donoghue brings to bear all her knowledge and grasp to examine how desire between women in English literature has been portrayed, from schoolgirls and vampires to runaway wives, from cross-dressing knights to contemporary murder stories. Donoghue looks at the work of those writers who have addressed the “unspeakable subject,” examining whether such desire between women is freakish or omnipresent, holy or evil, heartwarming or ridiculous as she excavates a long-obscured tradition of (inseparable) friendship between women, one that is surprisingly central to our cultural history. Donoghue writes about the half-dozen contrasting girl-girl plots that have been told and retold over the centuries, metamorphosing from generation to generation. What interests the author are the twists and turns of the plots themselves and how these stories have changed—or haven’t—over the centuries, rather than how they reflect their time and society. Donoghue explores the writing of Sade, Diderot, Balzac, Thomas Hardy, H. Rider Haggard, Elizabeth Bowen, and others and the ways in which the woman who desires women has been cast as not quite human, as ghost or vampire. She writes about the ever-present triangle, found in novels and plays from the last three centuries, in which a woman and man compete for the heroine’s love . . . about how—and why—same-sex attraction is surprisingly ubiquitous in crime fiction, from the work of Wilkie Collins and Dorothy L. Sayers to P. D. James. Finally, Donoghue looks at the plotline that has dominated writings about desire between women since the late nineteenth century: how a woman’s life is turned upside down by the realization that she desires another woman, whether she comes to terms with this discovery privately, “comes out of the closet,” or is publicly “outed.” She shows how this narrative pattern has remained popular and how it has taken many forms, in the works of George Moore, Radclyffe Hall, Patricia Highsmith, and Rita Mae Brown, from case-history-style stories and dramas, in and out of the courtroom, to schoolgirl love stories and rebellious picaresques. A revelation of a centuries-old literary tradition—brilliant, amusing, and until now, deliberately overlooked.

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.

From the New York Times bestselling author of Room comes a moving set of historical stories spanning centuries and continents. u200b The fascinating characters that roam across the pages of Emma Donoghue''s stories have all gone astray: they are emigrants, runaways, drifters, lovers old and new. They are gold miners and counterfeiters, attorneys and slaves. They cross other borders too: those of race, law, sex, and sanity. They travel for love or money, incognito or under duress. With rich historical detail, the celebrated author of Room takes us from puritan Massachusetts to revolutionary New Jersey, antebellum Louisiana to the Toronto highway, lighting up four centuries of wanderings that have profound echoes in the present. Astray offers us a surprising and moving history for restless times.

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.