Shortlisted for the Man Booker prize, it’s about a five-year old boy who was born in captivity and knows nothing beyond the room he and his mother live in. Told in his voice it is an extraordinary achievement, very well thought out, highly intriguing and unexpectedly sad. ~ Sarah Broadhurst
Winner of the Galaxy Paperback of the Year Award 2011.
Winner of the Orange Youth Panel Prize 2011.
Winner of the Hughes & Hughes Novel of the Year Award 2010.
Jack is five. He lives with his Ma. They live in a single, locked room. They don't have the key. Jack and Ma are prisoners. '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 'One of the most profoundly affecting books I've read in a long time' John Boyne 'Such incredible imagination, and dazzling use of language ...Room is unlike anything I've ever read before' Anita Shreve 'Room is that rarest of entities, an entirely original work of art. I mean it as the highest possible praise when I tell you that I can't compare it to any other book. Suffice to say that it's potent, darkly beautiful, and revelatory' Michael Cunningham.
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.
