Akin

Description

In her first contemporary novel since Room, bestselling author Emma Donoghue returns with her next masterpiece, a brilliant tale of love, loss and family. A retired New York professor's life is thrown into chaos when he takes his great-nephew to the French Riviera, in 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 a social worker calls looking for a temporary home for Michael, his eleven-year-old great-nephew. Though he has never met the boy, he gets talked into taking him along to France. This odd couple, suffering from jet lag and culture shock, argue about everything from steak hache to screen time, and the trip is looking like a disaster. But as Michael's ease with tech and sharp eye help Noah unearth troubling details about their family's past, both of them come to grasp the risks that people in all eras have run for their loved ones, and find 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 their painful story and start to write a new one together.

Born in Dublin in 1969, Emma Donoghue is an Irish emigrant twice over: 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. She also migrates between genres, writing literary history, biography, stage and radio plays as well as fairy tales and short stories. She is best known for her novels, which range from the historical (Frog Music, Slammerkin, Life Mask, Landing, The Sealed Letter and The Wonder) to the contemporary (Stir-Fry, Hood, Landing). Her international bestseller Room was a New York Times Best Book of 2010 and was a finalist for the Man Booker, Commonwealth, and Orange Prizes.

Highly emotional but never sentimental. * Vogue * Akin offers a subtle, entertaining portrait of the relationship-and friction-between age and youth. * The Economist * An important, touching novel that stays with you long after you're done reading it. * Independent * Poignant and hopeful, the bestselling novelist of Room has delivered another exquisite portrayal of an adult and child making their way in the world. * Woman & Home * A highly enjoyable novel' * Daily Mail * Absorbing. I loved the growing relationship between the two. -- Nina Pottell * Prima * Sweet, tender and defiantly unsentimental, this is a sad, funny look at how flawed, fragile people develop a sense of belonging. * Psychologies * A delicate and moving reminder of the way in which our human stories are made from practical choices - often in life as well as in literature. * Harper's Bazaar * Heartwarming and humourous. * Radio Times * A poignant and hopeful tale * Woman Magazine * Praise for Room: Emma Donoghue's writing is superb alchemy, changing innocence into horror and horror into tenderness -- Audrey Niffenegger, author of The Time Traveler's Wife One of the most profoundly affecting books I've read in a long time -- John Boyne, author of The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas Absorbing, truthful and beautiful . . . it is a kind of sustained poem in praise of motherhood and parental love * Observer * Sophisticated in outlook and execution . . . Utterly plausible, vividly described * New York Times * Donoghue mines material that on the face of it appears intractably bleak and surfaces with a powerful, compulsively readable work of fiction * Irish Times *