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
Roomtakes 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.
Astrayoffers us a surprising and moving history for restless times.
Born in Dublin in 1969, Emma Donoghue is an Irish emigrant twice over: she spent eight years in Cambridge, England, doing a PhD in eighteenth-century literature before moving to London, Ontario, where she lives with her partner and their two children. She also migrates between genres, writing literary history, biography, and stage and radio plays, as well as fairy tales and short stories. She is best known for her novels, which range from the historical (Slammerkin,Life Mask,The Sealed Letter) to the contemporary (Stir-Fry,Hood,Landing). Her international bestsellerRoomwas aNew York TimesBest Book of 2010 and a finalist for the Man Booker, Commonwealth, and Orange Prizes. The Hunt (fromAstray) has been short-listed for theSunday TimesEFG Private Bank Short Story Award, the world's most valuable short story prize.
Time and again, Emma Donoghue writes books that are unlike anything I have ever seen before, and ASTRAY is no exception. 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.
-Ann Patchett, author ofState of Wonder Emma Donoghue is one of the great literary ventriloquists of our timl”
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