![]() ![]() Donoghue, like so many Irish writers before her, emigrated from her native Dublin - first to England to earn her doctorate in 18th-century literature and then to Canada. ![]() These are people who cross boundaries, whether geographic, moral, sexual or legal, and often reside outside the mainstream. Readers looking for the visceral power of “Room” will find tastes of it, but in small, snack-size packages.Īll 14 stories concern some sort of wanderer: a wife fleeing the Irish famine to join her suffering husband in Toronto a black slave and his white “Missus” bolting from the nasty “Marse” in Civil War Texas prospectors who strike an unexpected vein of mutual comfort (with faint echoes of “ Brokeback Mountain”) in the snowbound Yukon goldfields Chicago counterfeiters who hatch a harebrained plot to ransom Lincoln’s exhumed body for a jailed colleague’s release and a lesbian couple losing each other to dementia after nearly six decades of living and making sculpture together in Toronto. Donoghue is best known for her previous book, the heart-stopping novel, “ Room,” about a young woman who gives birth and raises a small son while held captive in a bunker for seven years by a rapist. The historical short stories in Emma Donoghue’s new collection, “ Astray,” wander across centuries and continents, but they actually don’t stray far from this Irish-born writer’s preoccupations with captivity, sexual predation, prostitution and the grip of parenting. ![]()
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