Astray

By Emma Donoghue (Hardcover Book, 2012)

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 Room takes 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. Astray offers us a surprising and moving history for restless times.

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- Format: Hardcover Book
- Price: $25.99 US
- ISBN-13: 9780316206297
- On Sale Date: 10/30/2012
- Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
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Formats Available: Hardcover Book, Trade Paperback, Electronic Book, Audiobook, Audiobook, Trade Paperback, Audiobook
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Audiobook Excerpt

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 bestseller Room was a New York Times Best Book of 2010 and a finalist for the Man Booker, Commonwealth, and Orange Prizes. "The Hunt" (from Astray) has been short-listed for the Sunday Times EFG Private Bank Short Story Award, the world's most valuable short story prize.

Extraordinary acclaim for Emma Donoghue's Room:

"Emma Donoghue's heart-stopping new novel, Room, is right up there with Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones and Jacquelyn Michard's The Deep End of the Ocean. . . . Room is a big wow." --Heller McAlpin, San Francisco Chronicle

"Room is so beautifully contrived that it never once seems contrived. But be warned: once you enter, you'll be Donoghue's willing prisoner right down to the last page." --Malcolm Jones, Newsweek

"In a narrative at once delicate and vigorous--rich in psychological, sociological, and political meaning--Donoghue reveals how joy and terror often dwell side by side." --Ten Best Books of 2010, New York Times Book Review
"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 of State of Wonder).