Emma Donoghue

Narrator Jack and his mother, who was kidnapped seven years earlier when she was a 19-year-old college student, celebrate his fifth birthday. They live in a tiny, 11-foot-square soundproofed cell in a converted shed in the kidnapper's yard. The sociopath, whom Jack has dubbed Old Nick, visits at night, grudgingly doling out food and supplies. But Ma, as Jack calls her, proves to be resilient and resourceful--and attempts a nail-biting escape.

"Tourists flock to the cabin of eleven-year-old Anna O'Donnell, who is said to be living without food, and a journalist is sent to cover the sensation. Lib Wright, a veteran of Florence Nightingale's Crimean campaign, is hired to keep watch over the girl. As Anna's life ebbs away, Lib finds herself responsible not just for the care of a child but for that child's very survival. Haunting and magnetic, The Wonder is a searing examination of doubt,...

Mary Saunders, daughter of a poor seamstress and a father who died in jail, allows her desire for fine things to lead her into prostitution at a young age, and though she tries repeatedly to turn her life around, the lure of money and freedom proves difficult to resist.

A collection of short stories featuring a cross-section of society including runaways, drifters, gold miners, counterfeiters, attorneys, and slaves from Puritan Massachusetts and revolutionary New Jersey to antebellum Louisiana.

A fictional account of the life of Emily "Fido" Fatithfull, a pioneer in the British women's movement, who upon reconnecting with an old friend, Helen Codrington, becomes involved in a scandalous divorce case.

Nine-year-old Sumac Lottery considers it her job to make sure none of the Lottery celebrations are forgotten, especially now at Christmas time, and in her large, gay, and multiethnic family there are a lot of occasions for celebration in the house they all call Camelottery--but when a terrible ice storm hits Toronto, one of her dads, and her favorite brother cannot make it home from India, and it becomes increasingly difficult to hang on to the holiday...

It is a strangely hot September in a genteel Dublin suburb, and Pen O'Grady has lost her lover. Back in convent school in the late seventies, Pen fell for tall, pale, indecipherable Cara, whose enthralling oddities included mood swings and agoraphobia. Cara was engaged in unrequited love for other people as long as Pen knew her, but when nothing else could comfort Cara under the stress of exams, sex did, and the two became "sort of girlfriends." The...

A short story by Emma Donoghue from the collection Reader, I Married Him: Stories inspired by Jane Eyre. 'Since First I Saw Your Face' reimagines a relationship between two notable Victorian women. Edited by Tracy Chevalier, the full collection, Reader, I Married Him, brings together some of the finest and most creative voices in fiction today, to celebrate and salute the strength and lasting relevance of Charlotte Brontë's game-changing novel and...

In this beautiful story of adventure and survival from the New York Times bestselling author of Room, three men vow to leave the world behind them as they set out in a small boat for an island their leader has seen in a dream, with only faith to guide them. In seventh-century Ireland, a scholar and priest called Artt has a dream telling him to leave the sinful world behind. Taking two monks--young Trian and old Cormac--he rows down the river Shannon...

A heartbreakingly gorgeous novel based on the true story of two girls who fall secretly, deeply, and dangerously in love at boarding school in 19th century York, from the bestselling author of Room and The Wonder. Drawing on years of investigation and Anne Lister's five-million-word secret journal, Learned by Heart is the long-buried love story of Eliza Raine, an orphan heiress banished from India to England at age six, and Anne Lister, a brilliant,...