Our August Author of the Month: EMMA DONOGHUE
Monday, Jul 31, 2023 at 2:09pm
Born in Dublin in 1969, Emma Donoghue is a novelist, screenwriter and playwright. She spent eight years in Cambridge doing a PhD in eighteenth-century literature before moving to London, Ontario, where she lives with her partner and their two children. Room sold more than two million copies and won the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize (Canada and the Caribbean), as well as being shortlisted for the Man Booker and Orange Prizes. Donoghue scripted the Canadian-Irish film adaptation, which was nominated for four Academy Awards, including Best Picture. The Wonder was shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, and Donoghue co-wrote the 2022 screen adaptation for Netflix. The Pull of the Stars was a finalist for the Trillium Book Award and was longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize.
Her new book is Learned by Heart, a heartbreakingly gorgeous novel based on the true story of two girls who fall secretly, deeply and dangerously in love at boarding school in nineteenth century York.
Drawing on years of investigation and Anne Lister’s five-million-word secret journal, Learned by Heart is the long-buried love story of Eliza Raine, an orphan heiress banished from India to England at age six, and Anne Lister, a brilliant, troublesome tomboy, who meet at the Manor School for Young Ladies in York in 1805 when they are both fourteen.
Emotionally intense, psychologically compelling and deeply researched, Learned by Heart is an extraordinary work of fiction by one of the world’s greatest storytellers. Full of passion and heartbreak, the tangled lives of Anne Lister and Eliza Raine form a love story for the ages.
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Learned By Heart
- Emma Donoghue 
Hardcover
$32.99
Reader Reward Price: $29.69
A heartbreakingly gorgeous novel based on the true story of two girls who fall secretly, deeply and dangerously in love at boarding school in nineteenth century York, from the bestselling author of Room and The Wonder
Finalist for the Atwood Gibson Writers' Trust Fiction Prize
National Bestseller
Drawing on years of investigation and Anne Lister's five-million-word secret journal, Learned by Heart is the long-buried love story of Eliza Raine, an orphan heiress banished from India to England at age six, and Anne Lister, a brilliant, troublesome tomboy, who meet at the Manor School for Young Ladies in York in 1805 when they are both fourteen.
Emotionally intense, psychologically compelling and deeply researched, Learned by Heart is an extraordinary work of fiction by one of the world's greatest storytellers. Full of passion and heartbreak, the tangled lives of Anne Lister and Eliza Raine form a love story for the ages.
Haven
- Emma Donoghue
Trade paperback
$21.99
Reader Reward Price: $19.79
FINALIST FOR THE DUBLIN LITERARY AWARD
In a time of plague and terror, three men abandon their familiar world and set out in a small boat for an island they don't know exists, with only faith and devotion to guide them
In seventh-century Ireland, a scholar priest named Artt has a dream in which God tells him to leave the sinful world behind. With two monks--young Trian and old Cormac--he rows down the River Shannon in search of an isolated spot in which to found a monastery. Drifting out into the Atlantic, the three men find the impossibly steep, bare island known today as Skellig Michael. In such a place, what will survival mean?
The Pull of the Stars
- Emma Donoghue
Trade paperback
$23.99
Reader Reward Price: $21.59
THE NEW #1 BESTSELLER FROM THE AUTHOR OF THE WONDER AND ROOM
Dublin, 1918: three days in a maternity ward at the height of the great flu. A small world of work, risk, death and unlooked-for love, by the bestselling author of The Wonder and Room.
In an Ireland doubly ravaged by war and disease, Nurse Julia Power works at an understaffed hospital in the city centre, where expectant mothers who have come down with the terrible new flu are quarantined together. Into Julia's regimented world step two outsiders--Doctor Kathleen Lynn, on the run from the police, and a young volunteer helper, Bridie Sweeney.
In the darkness and intensity of this tiny ward, over three days, these women change each other's lives in unexpected ways. They lose patients to this baffling pandemic, but they also shepherd new life into a fearful world. With tireless tenderness and humanity, caregivers and mothers alike somehow do their impossible work.
In The Pull of the Stars, Emma Donoghue once again finds the light in the darkness in this new classic of hope and survival against all odds.
Akin
- Emma Donoghue
Trade paperback
$21.99
Reader Reward Price: $19.79
In her first contemporary novel since Room, bestselling author Emma Donoghue returns with a brilliant tale of love, loss and family. The life of a retired New York professor is thrown into chaos when he takes his great-nephew to the French Riviera in the hopes of uncovering his own mother's wartime secrets.
Noah is only days away from his first trip back to Nice since he was a child when he receives an unexpected request. A social worker is looking for a temporary home for Michael, his eleven-year-old great-nephew. Although he has never met the boy, Noah is convinced to take Michael with him to France.
Suffering from jet lag and culture shock, the odd couple argue about everything from steak haché to screen time, and the trip shows every sign of being a disaster. But Michael's skill with tech and his sharp eye help Noah unearth troubling details about their family's past. Eventually they both come to understand that people of all eras run risks on behalf of their loved ones. In learning this they discover that they are more akin than they knew.
Written with all the tenderness and psychological intensity that made Room a huge bestseller, Akin is a funny, heart-wrenching tale of an old man and a boy who unpick the threads of their painful stories and start to write a new one together.
The Wonder
- Emma Donoghue
Trade paperback
$21.99
Reader Reward Price: $19.79
Now a major film from the makers of Normal People and Room, starring Florence Pugh and streaming on Netflix.
SCOTIABANK GILLER PRIZE FINALIST
#1 NATIONAL BESTSELLER
"Heartbreaking and transcendent." --The New York Times
From the Man Booker Prize-shortlisted author of Room and the bestselling novel Haven
In 1850s Ireland a village is baffled by young Anna O'Donnell's fast. The girl appears to be thriving after months without food, and the story of this "wonder" has reached fever pitch. Tourists flock to the O'Donnell family's cabin, and a journalist is sent to cover the sensational story. Enter Lib, an English nurse trained by Florence Nightingale, who is hired to keep watch over Anna for two weeks to determine whether or not the girl is a fraud. As Anna deteriorates, Lib finds herself responsible not just for the care of a child, but for getting to the root of why the girl may actually be the victim of murder in slow motion.
Written with all the spare and propulsive tension that made Room a bestseller, The Wonder is a tale of two strangers who will transform each other's lives, a powerful psychological thriller and a story of love pitted against evil in its many masks.
"Beautifully moody with the taut pace of a thriller, The Wonder grapples with the potency of love, both human and divine." --Chatelaine
Room
- Emma Donoghue
Mass market paperback
$10.99
Reader Reward Price: $9.89
To five-year-old Jack, Room is the world. It's where he was born. It's where he and Ma eat and sleep and play and learn. There are endless wonders that let loose Jack's imagination: the snake under Bed that he constructs out of eggshells; the imaginary world projected through the TV; the coziness of Wardrobe, where Ma tucks him in safely at night, in case Old Nick comes.
Room is home to Jack, but to Ma, it's the prison where she's been held since she was nineteen--for seven long years. Through her fierce love for her son, she has created a life for him in that eleven-by-eleven-foot space. But Jack's curiosity is building alongside Ma's own desperation, and she knows that Room cannot contain either indefinitely.
Told in the inventive, funny and poignant voice of Jack, Room is a celebration of resilience--and a powerful story of a mother and son whose love lets them survive the impossible.
Slammerkin
- Emma Donoghue
Trade paperback
$22.99
Reader Reward Price: $20.69
Born to rough cloth in working-class London in 1748, Mary Saunders hungers for velvet and lace--a desire that leads her to a life of prostitution, where she encounters a freedom unknown to virtuous young women. In the end, it is clothes, their splendour and their deception, that bring Mary to the brink of disaster. Slammerkin is both a brilliant evocation of another era and a timeless tale of the rage of adolescence.
Astray
- Emma Donoghue
Trade paperback
$22.99
Reader Reward Price: $20.69
The bestselling author of Room fashions a cast of colourful characters--who inhabit worlds as diverse as Puritan Massachusetts and 1960s Toronto--each on their own extraordinary journey
Gold miner. Counterfeiter. Slave. Dishwasher. Prostitute. Attorney. Sculptor. Mercenary. Elephant. Corpse. The fascinating characters that roam across the pages of Emma Donoghue's stories have all gone astray: they are emigrants, runaways, drifters, lovers oldand new. They cross other borders, too--those of race, law, sex and sanity. They travel for love or money, incognito or under duress. With rich detail, the celebrated author of Room takes us from Puritan Massachusetts to the Yukon gold rush, from antebellum Louisiana to a 1960s Toronto highway. Astray offers us a surprising and movinghistory for restless times.
