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 outside. When he turns five, he starts to ask questions, and his mother reveals to him that there is a world beyond the walls. Told entirely in Jack’s voice, Room is no horror story or tearjerker, but a celebration of resilience and the love between parent and child.
An international bestseller as soon as it was published in August 2010, Room has sold close to three million copies. It won the Hughes & Hughes Irish Novel of the Year, the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize (for best Canadian novel), the Commonwealth Prize (Canada & Carribbean Region), the Canadian Booksellers’ Association Libris Awards (Fiction Book and Author of the Year), the Forest of Reading Evergreen Award, the W. H. Smith Paperback of the Year Award and the University of Canberra Book of the Year. It was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, the Orange Prize, the Kerry Group Irish Fiction Award, International Author of the Year (Galaxy National Book Awards), the Governor General’s Award and the Trillium English Book Award. The American Library Association gave it an Alex Award (for an adult book with special appeal to readers 12-18) and the Indie Choice Award for Adult Fiction. The Canadian Library Association named it as an Honour Book in their Canadian Young Adult Book Award. The four-voiced audiobook version won one of three Publishers Weekly Listen Up Awards and an Earphones Award.
The New York Times named it as one of their six best fiction titles of 2010 and the Washington Post included it in their Editors’ Top Ten. Room was also winner of a Salon Book Award for Fiction, an NPR Best Book of 2010, a New Yorker Reviewers’ Favorite, Bloomberg’s 2010 Top Novel, The Week Magazine’s Top Book 2010, and featured on many ‘best of the year’ lists including those of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and the Christian Science Monitor. Room was Amazon.ca and Indigo’s Best Book (as well as a Heather’s Pick) of 2010, fiction winner of the Goodreads Choice Awards, Top Pick of the Channel 4 TV Book Club, and also chosen by the Richard & Judy Book Club. Room was chosen as one of twenty-five titles to be given away by tens of thousands on World Book Night UK 2012.
A personal note: Room was inspired by… having kids; the locked room is a metaphor for the claustrophobic, tender bond of parenthood. I borrowed observations, jokes, kid grammar and whole dialogues from our son Finn, who was five while I was writing it. Room was also inspired by... ancient folk motifs of walled-up virgins who give birth (e.g. Rapunzel), often to heroes (e.g. Danaë and Perseus). Room was also inspired by… the Fritzl family’s escape from their dungeon in Austria – though I doubt I’ll ever use contemporary headlines as a launching point again, since I didn’t like being even occasionally accused of ‘exploitation’ or tagged ‘Fritzl writer’. But on the whole, publishing my seventh novel – and having the great good fortune to win new readers all over the world – has been a delight.
To buy Room
In the US, in paperback: https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/emma-donoghue/room/9780316268356/
or ebook: https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/emma-donoghue/room/9780316129114/
or multi-voiced audiobook: https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/emma-donoghue/room/9781611138436/
In the UK/Ireland/Australia, paperback: http://www.panmacmillan.com/book/emmadonoghue/roompicador40thanniversaryedition?format=978144720281301
or audio: https://thereadinghouse.co.uk/products/room-by-emmadonoghue
In Canada, paperback: http://harpercollins.ca/books/Room-Emma-Donoghue/?isbn=9781443413695
or ebook: http://harpercollins.ca/books/Room-Emma-Donoghue/?isbn=9781443404365
Wherever you live, PLEASE support your local indie bookstore by buying from them either directly or through an indie-friendly hub such as bookshop.org or hive.co.uk.
TRANSLATIONS
Room has been translated into more than forty languages.
REVIEWS
‘Astounding, terrifying… It’s a testament to Donoghue’s imagination that she is able to fashion radiance from such horror.’ – The New Yorker
‘One of the most affecting and subtly profound novels of the year. … For such a peculiar, stripped-down tale, it's fantastically evocative… Not too cute, not too weirdly precocious, not a fey mouthpiece for the author's profundities, Jack expresses a poignant mixture of wisdom, love and naivete that will make you ache to save him -- whatever that would mean.’ – Washington Post Book World
‘A feat of both infectious claustrophobia and controlled perspective.’ – Time
‘Heart-stopping… Donoghue’s utterly gripping plot may sound as if it has been ripped from headlines, but there's real art here… "Room" is a big wow.’ – San Francisco Chronicle
'Donoghue has created one of the pure triumphs of recent fiction: an ebullient child narrator, held captive with his mother in an 11-by-11-foot room, through whom we encounter the blurry, often complicated space between closeness and autonomy. In a narrative at once delicate and vigorous — rich in psychological, sociological and political meaning — Donoghue reveals how joy and terror often dwell side by side.' – note on Room’s choice as one of five best fiction titles of 2010 in the New York Times
‘Donoghue navigates beautifully around these limitations. Jack’s voice is one of the pure triumphs of the novel… Thrilling and at moments palm-sweatingly harrowing… This is a truly memorable novel, one that can be read through myriad lenses – psychological, sociological, political. It presents an utterly unique way to talk about love, all the while giving us a fresh, expansive eye on the world in which we live.’ – New York Times Book Review (cover review)
‘Jack is precocious but entirely believable, his passage out of cloistered innocence more universal than you might think (it’s no accident, surely, that the book’s title rhymes with “womb”).’ – People (a People Pick)
‘Narrated by a 5-year-old boy so real you could swear he was sitting right beside you… Room has all kinds of emotional wallop. But what makes the emotion possible is that this book is built like a finely crafted instrument that perfectly merges art and function… Room is so beautifully contrived that it never once seems contrived. But be warned: once you enter, you’ll be Donoghue’s willing prisoner right down to the last page.’ - Newsweek
"Room" is indeed suspenseful, but the fact that it could well keep you up late, eager to find out what happens next, isn't the extraordinary thing about this novel… Without denying Jack's vulnerability, Donoghue allows an almost terrifying resilience to seep into his narrative — terrifying because the momentum that drives a child to adulthood, that sends him rocketing away from the past, is so relentless and inexorable. There's a wholeness to the conclusion of "Room" that doesn't resort to false tidiness and bogus uplift.’ – Salon.com
‘Sophisticated in outlook and execution… Ms. Donoghue makes the gutsy and difficult choice to keep the book anchored somewhere inside Jack’s head… Utterly plausible, vividly described.’ – New York Times
‘A novel so disturbing that we defy you to stop thinking about it, days later … beautifully served by Jack's wise but innocent voice.’ – O Magazine
‘Powerful, tension-filled and takes a big risk… Highly recommended.’ – Now
‘Claustrophobic, controversial, brilliant… inventive, tense, and stringently intelligent.’ - Macleans
‘Remarkable… heartrending… Both gripping and poignant, it’s a tribute to human resourcefulness and resilience and extremity, and a stirring portrait of a mother’s devotion.’ – Toronto Star
‘Riveting and original… a page-turner… With a good deal of cleverness and skill, Donoghue manages to build a level of suspense which makes the book impossible to set aside.’ – London Free Press
‘Inventive and disturbing… compellingly subversive.’ – Winnipeg Free Press
‘Somehow, via the narrative voice of Jack and his stoic and heroic making-sense in words of his small world, it breaks free of every preset category. This is a novel, and a child, that will not be confined…. Pungent and percussive, Jack’s new-minted language grabs hold of his constricted life with startling force and zest … The book often bounces along through its profound darkness with a near-comic exuberance.’ – Independent
‘Charming, funny, artfully constructed and at times almost unbearably moving, Donoghue mines material that on the face of it appears intractably bleak and surfaces with a powerful, compulsively readable work of fiction that defies easy categorization. … Part childhood adventure story, part adult thriller, Room is above all the most vivid, radiant and beautiful expression of maternal love I have ever read. Emma Donoghue has stared into the abyss, honoured her sources and returned with the literary equivalent of a great Madonna and Child. This book will break your heart." – Irish Times
‘As a life-affirming fable of parent-child love, and an antidote to the prurience of so much crime fiction, it's a triumph, and deserves to be a hit.’ – Daily Telegraph
‘It takes a consummate writer to make us marvel at the mundane. Beckett's Waiting for Godot did it, of course. So did Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, set in a 1950s Siberian labour camp. Emma Donoghue does it so spectacularly that we are taken by surprise when, in the middle of the novel, resourceful Ma's escape plans swing into action… Donoghue’s great strength – apart from her storytelling gift – is her emotional intelligence.’ – Irish Independent
‘Both hard to put down and profoundly affecting... Donoghue has crafted a narrative that moves as breathlessly as a serial-killer thriller while convincingly portraying, with the precision of a science-fiction novel, how a boy might believe that a room is his whole world.’ – Sunday Times
‘A novel like no other … The grotesque is consistently balanced with the uplifting and there is a moment, halfway through the novel, where you feel you would fight anyone who tried to wrestle it from your grasp with the same ferocity that Ma fights for Jack, such is the author's power to make out of the most vile circumstances something absorbing, truthful and beautiful.’ – Observer
‘A celebration of the freedoms we take for granted. A gripping, moving read.’ – Time Out
‘The story is told with unsurpassed panache. … Room will certainly be much garlanded, and it will deserve every prize it gets. Fantastic.’ – Readers Digest
‘I’ve never read a more heart-burstingly, gut wrenchingly compassionate novel . . . As for sweet, bright, funny Jack, I wanted to scoop him up out of the novel and never let him go. In him, Donoghue has created 21st-century fiction’s most uniquely loveable voice.’ – Daily Mail
‘Not many writers, though, would have had the courage, or the ability, to visit this particular place and produce such a startlingly original and moving piece of work . . . it is a testament to Donoghue’s skill how quickly that voice becomes acceptable, then endearing and finally utterly compelling, as compelling as the murdered young girl who narrated Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones. … It is a tremendous achievement.’ - Scotsman
'Totally unique and intriguing. It kept us utterly hooked.' - Cosmopolitan
‘Gripping, harrowing, oddly life-affirming and imaginative… extraordinary power’ – Mirror (Book of the Week)
‘A brilliant book, moving, true, funny, desolate and unmissable.’ – Herald (Ireland)
Extras
An article I wrote ten years after Room: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/may/08/emma-donoghue-on-writing-room-i-toned-down-some-of-the-horror-of-the-fritzl-case
The excellent ten-page Back Bay Readers’ Picks Reading Group Guide to Room: Click here.
For an interactive floor plan and lots of other information about Room, check out www.roomthebook.com.
‘A Library for Ma and Jack,’ selection © Emma Donoghue Ltd, 2010.It was so hard choosing just ten books for Jack and Ma to have in Room that I’ve put together a sort of anthology of texts that might help them on the Outside. Click here to read more.
Here is Little, Brown’s atmospheric trailer for the novel:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OfpTad-lt-U
And HarperCollins Canada’s one, which was a finalist in the year’s book trailer awards:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SBpnelG0f9A
An in-depth 40-minute audio discussion of Room by the Slate Book Club, http://www.slate.com/id/2286457/
Reading from Room at International Festival of Authors in Toronto, October 2010: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/arts/books/in-other-words/podcast-emma-donoghue-reads-at-ifoa-2010/article1784074/
Interviewed by Melissa Block on NPR’s All Things Considered, 27 September 2010: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=130143360
Interviewed by John Hockenberry on The Takeaway, 29 September 2010: http://www.thetakeaway.org/2010/sep/29/emma-donoghue-her-new-novel-room/
A fascinating case-study of the marketing of Room, broadcast on NPR, 10 September 2010: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=129757766
Interviewed by Harriett Gilbert on BBC World Service’s The Strand, 12 August 2010: http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p008zrbp/The_Strand_The_Strand_Thursday_12th_August_2010/
Interviewed by Jenny Murray on Woman’s Hour, BBC Radio 4, 12 August 2010: http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00t89g6/Womans_Hour_11_08_2010/
'Bringing Up Baby', Emma Donoghue in discussion with Sir Michael Rutter at a Royal Society / Royal Society of Literature event, 7 July 2013, http://royalsociety.tv/rsPlayer.aspx?presentationid=1131
Interview about development of the film of Room with Miriam O'Callaghan on The John Murray Show, September 2013
Interview with Xtra Tv about a queer interpretation of Room, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mYqXZsgO5vA
Bibliography
Nadeem Ahmad Rather and Sukanya Mondal, 'Unlocking the Voices of Children: The Evolution of Child Narrators in Anglophone Literature,' in Childhood in the Past (2024) https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17585716.2024.2351626
Viktoria Susanne Herold, '(Dis)attending to the Other: Contemporary Fictions of Empathy,' Doctoral thesis UCL 2023 https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10177466/
Ahlam Ahmed Mohamed Othman, 'Truth in Fiction is Truth Infection: A Study of Emma Donoghue’s Room, ' Studi Irlandesi 13 (July 2023)
Jockim Devaraj, 'The Power of Transition and Child's Play in Emma Donoghue's novel Room' (February 2023) https://www.researchgate.net/publication/368788504_The_Power_Of_Transition_And_Child's_Play_In_Emma_Donoghue's_Novel_Room
James Little, 'Confinement and the Transnational in Emma Donoghue's Room,' Open Library of Humanities 8 (2), 2022, Special Collection: Local and Universal in Irish Literature and Culture, https://olh.openlibhums.org/article/id/8774/ A brilliant exploration of the novel in the context of my whole career.
Robinson Murphy, ‘Castration Desire: Less Is More in Emma Donoghue's Room,’ College Literature 49:1 (Winter 2022), 53-79, and adapted into Chapter Six of Murphy's Castration Desire: Less Is More in Global Anglophone Fiction (Bloomsbury, 2023). An outstandingly perceptive theoretical analysis of the novel which considers Jack as a gender nonconforming, enviromentalist figure.
Virginie Buhl, 'From research-creation in translation studies to creative writing: report of a doctoral journey,' REA (Etudes sur le Monde Anglophone), 20.1 (2022), https://journals.openedition.org/erea/15472?lang=en
María Elena Jaime de Pablos, ‘Becoming Resilient Subjects: Vulnerability and Resistance in Emma Donoghue’s Room,’ in M.I. Romero-Ruiz and P Cuder-Domínguez, eds. Cultural Representations of Gender Vulnerability and Resistance (Palgrave, 2022), pp.33-52. https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-95508-3_3
Carolyn Gebauer, 'Narrative of Emancipation: Character-Centered Illusion, Cognitive Dissonance, and Narrative Unreliability in Emma Donoghue’s Room (2010),' in her Making Time: World Construction in the Present-Tense Novel (DeGruyter, 2021), 257-175.
Virginie Buhl, ‘Translating Vulnerable Voices into French: The Child Narrators in Emma Donoghue’s Room and Stephen Kelman’s Pigeon English,' Translation Studies XIV (2021), 29-45, https://www.ceeol.com/search/article-detail?id=1073871
S. Sreelekshmi, 'Beyond the Walls: A Meditation on Confinement and Freedom in Emma Donoghue’s Room,' Journal of Emerging Technologies and Innovative Research, 8:1 (Jan 2021), https://www.jetir.org/view?paper=JETIR2101217
Christopher John Stephens, 'Confinement and Escape: Emma Donoghue and E. L. Doctorow in Our Time of Self-Isolation,' (2020) https://www.popmatters.com/donoghue-room-doctorow-homerlangley-2645632574.html
Eke Pernik, 'The influence of traumatic experience on a child’s identity development in Emma Donoghue’s Room' (2020), https://dspace.ut.ee/handle/10062/69926
Andrea O'Reilly, 'Redemptive Mothering: Reclamation, Absolution and Deliverance in Emma Donoghue's Room and The Wonder,' in Writing Mothers: Narrative Acts of Care, Redemption, and Transformation, ed. BettyAnn Martin and Michelann Parr (Bradford, ON: Demeter, 2020), pp.141-66
Putti Aisyah and Hujuala Rika Ayu, 'Negotiating Motherhood in Constraining Space in Emma Donoghue's Room,' Paradigm 2 (2): 83, November 2019, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/337692177_NEGOTIATING_MOTHERHOOD_IN_CONSTRAINING_SPACE_IN_EMMA_DONOGHUE'S_ROOM
Kathleen Costello-Sullivan, ' “Stories Are a Different Kind of True”: Narrative and the Space of Recovery in Emma Donoghue’s Room,' Chapter Four of Trauma and Recovery in the Twenty-First-Century Irish Novel (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2018), pp.92-109.
Ankita Das and Rajni Singh, 'Contesting Captive Spaces: A Reading of Emma Donoghue's Room,' Journal of English Language and Literature 9:2 (April 2018), chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/83fe/179029db37d9a3dc1e7789689cadb4af2393.pdf
Ann Marie A. Short, “In This Whole Story, That’s the Shocking Detail?” Extended Breastfeeding in Emma Donoghue’s Room,’ in Breastfeeding and Culture: Discourses and Representation, ed. Ann Marie A. Short, Abigail L. Palko and Dionne Irving (Demeter Press, 2018), 149-164.
Noémi Albert, 'Jack be nimble, Jack be quick: A curious existence in Emma Donoghue's Room,' 2018, chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://hrcak.srce.hr/file/336402
Sara Martín-Ruiz (University of the Balearic Isles), ‘Emma Donoghue’s Room: Perspectives from Direct Provision’, paper delivered at conference on Irish Shame, Buffalo NY, 2018
Libe García Zarranz, ‘Corporeal Citizenship: Deviant Bodies in Emma Donoghue's Room,’ in her TransCanadian Feminist Fictions: New Crossborder Ethics (McGill-Queens, 2017). Excellent reading of Jack's oddities.
Maite Escudero-Alias, 'The Willful Child': Resignifying Vulnerability through Affective Attachments in Emma Donoghue's Room,’ in Victimhood and Vulnerability in 21st Century Fiction, 2017, 35-52.
Andrea O’Reilly, ‘ “All Those Years, I Kept Him Safe”: Maternal Practice as Redemption and Resistance in Emma Donoghue’s Room’, in Journal of the Motherhood Initiative for Research & Community Involvement, 8:1-2 (Spring/Fall 2017), 89-98.
Margaret O’Neill, ‘Transformative Tales for Recessionary Times: Emma Donoghue’s Room and Marian Keyes’ The Brightest Star in the Sky,’ in Lit: Literature Interpretation Theory, 28:1 (2017), 55-74.
Samuel Caleb Wee (Nanyang Technological University), '“…Need to Listen to Jack”: The Alterity of Childhood and Literature in Emma Donoghue’s Room,' paper delivered at IASIL (Singapore, 2017).
Marisol Morales Ladrón, ‘Psychological Resilience in Emma Donoghue’s Room,’ in National Identities and Imperfections in Contemporary Irish Literature: Unbecoming Irishness, ed. Luz Mar González-Árias (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), pp.83-98.
Margaret O'Neill, 'Transformative tales for recessionary times: Emma Donoghue's Room and Marian Keyes' The Brightest Star in the sky,' in eds Claire Bracken and Tara Harney-Mahajan, Post-Celtic Tiger Ireland and Contemporary Women’s Writing: Feminist interventions and imaginings (special issue LIT 2017, Routledge 2021)
Kathleen Walsh, 'Mother and Father: The Dual Role of the Single Parent in Room,' https://medium.com/@kathleenjuliamary/mother-and-father-the-dual-role-of-the-single-parent-in-room-e36c62a26dc5
Lucia Lorenzi ‘ “Am I Not OK?": Negotiating and Re-defining Traumatic Experience in Emma Donoghue's Room,’ Canadian Literature, No.228-29 (Spring-Summer 2016) https://go.gale.com/ps/i.do?id=GALE%7CA491086628&sid=googleScholar&v=2.1&it=r&linkaccess=abs&issn=00084360&p=AONE&sw=w&userGroupName=anon%7E8a24a0e1
Moynagh Sullivan (Maynooth University), 'Mother and Child: Subjective Time, Space, History in Emma Donoghue's Room,' keynote delivered at ACIS (University of Miami, 2015).
Dominique Hetu, ‘Of Wonder and Encounter: Textures of Human and Nonhuman Relationality,’ in Mosaic, 48:3 (Sept 2015). Compares Room with Sous Beton by Karoline Georges.
Claudia Weber, 'Anxieties Reloaded and Fears Overcome: Emma Donoghue’s Room (2010)', in her Televisionization: Enactments of TV Experiences in Novels from 1970 to 2010 (2014), pp.161-82
Renata Brosch (University of Stuttgart), 'Counterfocalization and Empathy: The Example of Emma Donoghue’s Room,' paper delivered at 2nd International Network Conference (Durham University, 2014)
Marco Caracciolo, 'Two child narrators: defamiliarization, empathy and reader-response in Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident and Emma Donoghue's Room,' Semiotica, 202 (2014)
Sandra Dinter, 'Plato's Cave Revisited: Epistemology, Perception and Romantic Childhood in Emma Donoghue's Room (2010)', in C21 Literature: Journal of Twenty-First Century Writings, 2.1 (Oct 2013)
Moynagh Sullivan, 'Lactation, Lactation, Lactation: Places, Bodies and In Between in Emma Donoghue's Room,' paper delivered at betweenbodies/bodiesbetween conference, National University of Ireland, Maynooth (2013)
Khem Raj Sharma, 'Narrative Complexity in Emma Donoghue’s Room,' paper delivered at MELUSMELOW International Conference on Patterns of Story Telling, Panjab University, Chandigarh (2013)
Jacklyn Guay, “Blame the Mother: Jungian Analysis of the Media’s Role in Affecting Further Trauma to the Individual, as exemplified in Emma Donoghue’s Room and Lionel Shriver’s We Need to Talk About Kevin”, paper delivered at Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association National Conference (Washington DC 2013)
Renate Brosch, Stuttgart University, ‘Narrativity and Visualisation: Narrative Beginnings as Attention’, paper delivered at International Conference on Narrative (York, 2013)
Maite Escudero-Alias, (Zaragoza, Spain), ‘Beyond Trauma Narrative: Affects and Attachment in Emma Donoghue’s Room’, paper delivered at What Happens Now: 21st Century Writing in English conference (University of Lincoln, 2012)
Sandra Dinter (Leibniz Hanover, Germany), ‘ “It’s like a TV planet that’s all about us”: Postromantic Childhood and Television in Emma Donoghue’s Room’, paper delivered at What Happens Now: 21st Century Writing in English conference (University of Lincoln, 2012)
Anne Fogarty, ‘Tales of Becoming?: Childhood and Adolescence in Contemporary Irish Fiction,’ paper delivered at ESSE-11 conference (Istanbul, 2012)
Marcela Chmelinová, ‘Emma Donoghue: Room – Translation and Analysis’ (BA thesis, University of Masaryk, 2012)
Ann-Sofie Lacroix, 'Jack, the Explorer: Analysis of the Unreliable Child Narrator and the Mother-Child Dyad in Emma Donoghue’s Room (2010)' (MA thesis, University of Leuven, 2011-12)
Ben Davies, ‘Exceptional Intercourse: sex, time and space in contemporary novels by male British and American writers’ [coda about Room], (thesis, University of St Andrews, 2011)
Fintan O’Toole, ‘Future Fictions’, in Princeton University Library Chronicle (LXXIII), Autumn 2010, 407-18. Fascinating essay that puts Room in the context of other current Irish fiction focused on young protagonists.
‘The Q&A: Emma Donoghue’, http://www.economist.com/blogs/prospero/2010/11/room
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/bookclub/2011/01/live-chat-with-emma-donoghue.html
‘Living Room’, Emily Landau, http://www.walrusmagazine.com/blogs/2010/10/25/living-room/#more-8609
Ron Charles, ‘The teeny, tiny world of little Jack’, Washington Post Book World, 15 September 2010, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/story/2010/09/14/ST2010091406651.html
Malcolm Jones, ‘No Exit’, Newsweek, 9 September 2010, http://www.newsweek.com/2010/09/09/books-a-room-with-no-view.html
Aimee Bender, ‘Separation Anxiety’, New York Times Book Review, 19 September 2010
Nicola Barr, ‘Upstairs, Downstairs… A Child’s Chamber of Horrors’, Observer, 1 August 2010
Declan Hughes, ‘This Book Will Break Your Heart’, Irish Times, 24 July 2010
Mary Shine Thompson, ‘A Room With a View’, Irish Independent, 24 July 2010
‘The NS Books Interview: Emma Donoghue’, http://www.newstatesman.com/books/2010/10/fritzl-case-novel-child-room
Boyd Tonkin, ‘Room With a Panoramic View: How Emma Donoghue's Latest Novel Aims to Tell a Universal Story’, Independent, 6 August 2010, http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/features/room-with-a-panoramic-view-how-emma-donoghues-latest-novel-aims-to-tell-a-universal-story-2044373.html. A particularly insightful article.
‘I Knew I Wasn’t Being Voyeuristic’, interview by Sarah Crown, Guardian, 13 August 2010, http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2010/aug/13/emma-donoghue-room-josef-fritzl
Emma Donoghue, ‘Finding Jack’s Voice: Some Thoughts on Children and Language’, in Finding the Words: Writers on Inspiration, Desire, War, Celebrity, Exile, and Breaking the Rules, ed. Jared Bland (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 2011).
Emma Donoghue, ‘The Little Voices In Our Heads That Last a Lifetime’, Irish Times, 7 August 2010