Room

Emma Donoghue

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Winner of the WHSmith Paperback of the Year

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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,

author of The Time Traveler's Wife

Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2010

It's Jack's birthday, and he is excited about turning five. He 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 noting 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 . . .

‘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

11th December: Emma Donoghue on reading and writing

Posted By Rosanna Boscawen on Tuesday 11th Dec 2012

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.

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Guardian Interview: Emma Donoghue

Posted By Rosanna Boscawen on Wednesday 31st Oct 2012

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

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Astray shortlisted for Novel of the Year at the Irish Book Awards

Posted By Rosanna Boscawen on Wednesday 31st Oct 2012

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'Sissy' from Emma Donoghue's Three and a Half Deaths

Posted By Emma Donoghue on Tuesday 9th Oct 2012

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.

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