The award-winning author of Room displays her prodigious writing talents in creating a gem of a short story collection that is full of memorable characters. Ann Patchett, Orange prize-winning author of Bel Canto said of Astray ‘There is such a deep and compassionate imagination at work in every story in this collection that Astray feels almost like an act of clairvoyance.'
Fascinating and compelling these short stories are inspired by real life characters and events plucked from four centuries of history.
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.
'Emma Donoghue is one of the great literary ventriloquists of our time. Her imagination is kaleidoscopic. She steps borders and boundaries with great ease and style. In her hands the centuries dissolve, and then they crystallise back again into powerful words on the page.' Colum McCann
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.
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