Astray

Emma Donoghue

Astray

Counterfeiter. Dishwasher. Prostitute. Attorney. Sculptor. Mercenary. Elephant. Corpse.

The fascinating characters that roam across the pages of Emma Donoghue’s latest fact-inspired fictions have all gone astray: they are emigrants, runaways, drifters. They cross other borders, too: those of race, law, sex and sanity. They travel for love or money, incognito or under duress.

Donoghue describes the brutal plot hatched by a slave in conjunction with his master’s wife to set them both free; she draws out the difficulties of gold mining in the Yukon, even in the supposedly plentiful early days, and she takes us to an early Puritan community in Massachusetts unsettled by an invented sex scandal. Astray also includes ‘The Hunt’, a shocking confession of one soldier’s violent betrayal during the American Revolution, which has been shortlisted for the 2012 Sunday Times Short Story Award.

Astray is a sequence of fourteen stories by the prize-winning author of Room and The Sealed Letter. These strange, true tales light up four centuries of wanderings, offering a past made up of deviations, and a surprising and moving history for restless times.

Rosanna Boscawen
 

Emma Donoghue is the bestselling author of Room and more recently of a wonderful collection of short stories, Astray. Read on for reading tips a-plenty.

Rosanna Boscawen
 

In October, bestselling author of Room Emma Donoghue spoke to the Guardian about literary success and how she got their in the first place.

Rosanna Boscawen
 


Emma Donoghue
 

Three and a Half Deaths by Emma Donoghue features an accident, a suicide, an act of criminal negligence . . . and a near-death experience. These stories – set in France, the USA and Canada – bring together calamities from two centuries. The third story from the collection, ‘Sissy’, explores culpability – the survivor’s guilt of the sister of a small child who died in the 1840s in London, Ontario – because the story of any death must include its lingering effects on the living. Although Emma often writes about the famous, she has a particular interest in the obscure: people whose trace on the historical record is faint, taking the form of a footnote, or a handful of mutely eloquent bones.


Emma Donoghue
 

A brilliant story from Emma Donoghue's new collection, Astray.