Astray

Description

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.

Born in 1969, Emma Donoghue is an Irish writer who spent eight years in England before moving to Canada. Her fiction includes Slammerkin, Life Mask, Touchy Subjects, The Sealed Letter and the international bestseller Room (shortlisted for the Man Booker and Orange prizes).

'Time and again, Emma Donoghue writes books that are unlike anything I have ever seen before, and Astray is no exception.' Ann Patchett, author of State of Wonder '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 crystallize back again into powerful words on the page.' Colum McCann, author of Let the Great World Spin 'Superb . . . read this book. It is a gem.' Sunday Times 'Vivid and moving' Good Housekeeping 'A pitch-perfect collection of short stories, inspired by real-life characters whose lives have gone awry' Marie Claire 'Donoghue's affinity for yesteryear's untold tales is charming, and her talent for dialect is hard to overstate . . . Each and every one of Donoghue's characters leaves an impression' TIME