Emma Donoghue

Harvard Book Store is delighted to welcome bestselling novelist EMMA DONOGHUE for a reading from her most recent book, Room, which was short-listed for the Man Booker Prize and won the Irish Book Award. It is newly out in paperback.

To five-year-old-Jack, Room is the world.... It's where he was born, it's where he and his Ma eat and sleep and play and learn. At night, his Ma shuts him safely in the wardrobe, where he is meant to be asleep when Old Nick visits.

Room is home to Jack, but to Ma it's the prison where she has been held for seven years. Through her fierce love for her son, she has created a life for him in this eleven-by-eleven-foot space. But with Jack's curiosity building alongside her own desperation, she knows that Room cannot contain either much longer.

"[Donoghue's] impressive feat of literary ventriloquism is transmuted into a powerfully empathetic work of art.... Ma's voice is muted, her thoughts opaque. Donoghue does not presume to imagine her internal struggles, and this discretion, paradoxically, enables us to fully appreciate Ma's resilience, undistracted by tabloid horror-mongering. Once again, Donoghue fulfills the imperative that drives all her work: to honor stories that have not been told by finding the best way to tell them." —Slate