Emma Donoghue | Novels: ROOM, The Sealed Letter, Landing, Life Mask, Slammerkin, Hood, Stir-Fry

Learned by Heart:  The heartbreaking story of two very different women - diarist Anne Lister, the inspiration for the series Gentleman Jack, and orphaned biracial heiress Eliza Raine - who meet at fourteen and upend each other’s lives.…

Haven: In this adventure story set around the year 600, three Irishmen vow to leave the world behind and set out in a small boat to found a monastery on…

The Pull of the Stars: Dublin, 1918: three days in a maternity ward at the height of the Great Flu. A small world of work, risk, death and unlooked-for love.

Akin: A tale of love, loss and family, in which 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…

The Wonder: The Irish Midlands, 1859. An English nurse, Lib Wright, is summoned to a tiny village to observe what some are claiming as a medical anomaly or a miracle - a girl said to have survived…

Frog Music: Summer of 1876: San Francisco is in the fierce grip of a record-breaking heatwave and a smallpox epidemic. Through the window of a railroad saloon, a young woman called Jenny Bonnet is shot dead.…

Room (London: Picador; Toronto: HarperCollins Canada; New York: Little Brown, 2010), my Man-Booker-shortlisted seventh novel, is the story of a five-year-old called Jack, who lives in a single room with his Ma and has never been…

The Sealed Letter (New York: Harcourt, 2008; Melbourne: Scribe, 2009; London: Picador, 2011). Based on a scandal that gripped Britain in the 1860s, this domestic thriller – my sixth novel - explores a feminist spinster’s reluctant involvement…

Landing (New York : Harcourt, 2007).  A contemporary love story about emigration, Landing – my fifth novel - is set in boomtown Ireland and smalltown Canada. In 2008 the Golden Crown Literary Society

Life Mask (New York: Harcourt; London: Virago, 2004), my fourth novel, is about a love triangle in 1790s London, among the elite who moved through the overlapping worlds of art, politics, sport and theatre.

 Slammerkin (London: Virago, 2000, reissued 2012; New York: Harcourt, 2000; Toronto: HarperCollins Canada, 2009).  Inspired by a murder that took place in the Welsh Borders in 1763, Slammerkin, my third novel (and first historically inspired one),…

Hood (UK 1995, US 1996, reissued 2011). Penelope O’Grady and Cara Wall are risking disaster when, like teenagers in any intolerant time and place—here, a Dublin convent school in the late 1970s—they fall in love. In…

Stir-fry (1994). My first novel, Stir-fry is a coming-of-age story about Maria, a seventeen-year-old girl from rural Ireland who goes to university in Dublin and accidentally moves in with a lesbian couple.