Critics' Opinion:
Readers' rating:
Published in USA
Oct 2012
288 pages
Genre: Short Stories/Essays
Publication Information
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.
"[T]he stories are vivid, curious, and honest...notable more for the historical moments they reconstruct than for the people who inhabit them." - Publishers Weekly
"Another exciting change of pace from the protean Donoghue." - Kirkus
"Working in a different vein from the wrenching Room, Donoghue has created masterly pieces that show what short fiction can do. Not just for devotees of the form." - Library Journal
"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
"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
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Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Born in Dublin, Ireland, in October 1969, Emma Donoghue is the youngest of eight children of Frances and Denis Donoghue (the literary critic). She attended Catholic convent schools in Dublin, apart from one eye-opening year in New York at the age of ten. In 1990 she earned a first-class honours BA in English and French from University College Dublin (unfortunately, without learning to actually speak French). She moved to England, and in 1997 received her PhD (on the concept of friendship between men and women in eighteenth-century English fiction) from the University of Cambridge. From the age of 23, she has earned her living as a writer, and has been lucky enough to never have an 'honest job' since she was sacked after a single summer month as a chambermaid. After years of commuting ...
... Full Biography
Author Interview
Link to Emma Donoghue's Website
Name Pronunciation
Emma Donoghue: don-a-hue
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