Best Selling Books by Emma Donoghue

In this deeply moving and life-affirming tale, a mother must nurture her five-year-old son through an unfathomable situation with only the power of their imagination and their boundless capacity to love. Written for the stage by Academy Award® nominee Emma Donoghue, this unique theatrical adaptation featuring songs and music by Kathryn Joseph and director Cora Bissett takes audiences on a richly emotional journey told through ingenious stagecraft, powerhouse performances, and heart-stopping storytelling. Room reaffirms our belief in humanity and the astounding resilience of the human spirit. This updated and revised edition was published to coincide with the Broadway premiere in Spring 2023.

Now a Netflix film starring Florence Pugh: In this “old-school page turner” (Stephen King, New York Times Book Review) by the bestselling author of Room, an English nurse is brought to a small Irish village to observe what appears to be a miracle—a girl said to have survived without food for months—and soon finds herself fighting to save the child''s life. Tourists flock to the cabin of eleven-year-old Anna O''Donnell, who believes herself to be living off manna from heaven, 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. Written with all the propulsive tension that made Room a huge bestseller, The Wonder works beautifully on many levels -- a tale of two strangers who transform each other''s lives, a powerful psychological thriller, and a story of love pitted against evil. Acclaim for The Wonder: "Deliciously gothic.... Dark and vivid, with complicated characters, this is a novel that lodges itself deep" (USA Today, 3/4 stars) "Heartbreaking and transcendent"(New York Times) "A fable as lean and discomfiting as Anna''s dwindling body.... Donoghue keeps us riveted" (Chicago Tribune) "Donoghue poses powerful questions about faith and belief" (Newsday)

Fairytales with a twist from the Man Booker and Orange prize-shortlisted author of Room. In Kissing the Witch, Emma Donoghue unwinds thirteen fairy tales and writes them anew: Cinderella forsakes the handsome prince and runs off with the fairy godmother, Beauty discovers the Beast behind the mask is not so very different from the face she sees in the mirror, and Snow White is awakened from slumber by the bittersweet fruit of an unnamed desire. In these stories, Emma Donoghue reveals heroines young and old in unexpected alliances – sometimes treacherous, sometimes erotic, but always courageous. Told with luminous voices that shimmer with sensuality and truth, these age-old characters shed their antiquated cloaks to travel a seductive new landscape, radiantly transformed.

“A wrenching love story” (Chris Bohjalian, The Washington Post) 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, troublesome tomboy, who meet at the Manor School for young ladies in York in 1805 when they are both fourteen. Emotionally intense, psychologically compelling, and deeply researched, Learned by Heart is an extraordinary work of fiction by one of the world’s greatest storytellers. Full of passion and heartbreak, the tangled lives of Anne Lister and Eliza Raine form a love story for the ages.

The Competitiveness of Financial Institutions and Centers in Europe addresses key questions facing European financial markets today. It relates to the dramatic increase in competition between financial centres and institutions under the influence of several factors -- the effect of innovation in financial products and technological processes, widespread deregulation and associated re-regulation (prudential rules), the implementation of the single market in Europe and the new strategies of institutions and national financial centres facing more competitive conditions. Major subjects include the transfer of fragility from the real economy to the financial sector, and vice versa, through such channels as booming financial activities, intense competition and greater risks, as in property lending, and also the more cautious policies adopted by financial intermediaries in response to losses in the recent recession. The papers were contributed by members of universities, the private financial sector, national and international policy making communities, and presented at the 18th Colloquium of the Société Universitaire Européenne de Recherches Financières, in Dublin, May 1994. They will be of central importance to policy makers, bankers, financial executives and academics.

In the late ’70s, convent school teenagers Pen O’Grady and Cara Wall fall in love. They prove themselves to be up to the challenge of a relationship deemed unacceptable in Catholic Ireland—until Cara dies in a car accident. Hood is a bittersweet, complicated love story.

Inspired by a true unsolved crime, Frog Music is a gripping historical novel by Emma Donoghue, author of the multi-million-copy bestseller Room. San Francisco, 1876: a stifling heat wave and smallpox epidemic have engulfed the City. Deep in the streets of Chinatown live three former stars of the Parisian circus: Blanche, now an exotic dancer at the House of Mirrors, her lover Arthur and his companion Ernest. When an eccentric outsider joins their little circle, secrets unravel, changing everything – and leaving one of them dead. A New York Times bestseller, Frog Music is a dark and compelling story of intrigue and murder.

Based on a scandalous divorce case that gripped England in 1864, "The Sealed Letter" is a riveting, provocative drama of friends, lovers, and divorce, Victorian style.

Privilege has a price for three high-society Londoners in this eighteenth-century historical novel by the author of Room and The Pull of the Stars. In a time of looming war, of glittering spectacle and financial disasters, the wealthy liberals of the Whig Party work to topple a tyrannical prime minister and a lunatic king. Marriages and friendships stretch or break; political liaisons prove as dangerous as erotic ones; and everyone wears a mask. Will Eliza Farren, England''s leading comedic actress, gain entry to that elite circle that calls itself the World? Can Lord Derby, the inventor of the horse race that bears his name, endure public mockery of his long, unconsummated courtship of the actress? Will Anne Damer, a sculptor and rumored Sapphist, be the cause of Eliza''s fall from grace? Let the games begin . . . “Mesmerizing. With the French Revolution raging in the background, Donoghue has lighted on another terrific story, and she pulls off a dazzling feat of choreography.” —Julia Livshin, The Washington Post Book World “Few will be able to put it down before its enthralling tales end.” —Chicago Tribune

An ad in the students’ union—“2 females seek flatmate. No bigots”—leads Maria to a home with warm Ruth and wickedly funny Jael. But one day, something Maria glimpses by accident forces her to question everything she thought she knew.

In Dublin, 1918, a maternity ward at the height of the Great Flu is a small world of work, risk, death, and unlooked-for love, in "Donoghue''s best novel since Room" (Kirkus Reviews). In an Ireland doubly ravaged by war and disease, Nurse Julia Power works at an understaffed hospital in the city center, where expectant mothers who have come down with the terrible new Flu are quarantined together. Into Julia''s regimented world step two outsiders—Doctor Kathleen Lynn, a rumoured Rebel on the run from the police, and a young volunteer helper, Bridie Sweeney. In the darkness and intensity of this tiny ward, over three days, these women change each other''s lives in unexpected ways. They lose patients to this baffling pandemic, but they also shepherd new life into a fearful world. With tireless tenderness and humanity, carers and mothers alike somehow do their impossible work. In The Pull of the Stars, Emma Donoghue once again finds the light in the darkness in this new classic of hope and survival against all odds.

The first collection of plays from Booker Prize and Orange Prize finalist and author of international bestseller Room, Emma Donoghue. Contains the plays Kissing the Witch, Don’t Die Wondering, Trespasses, Ladies and Gentlemen, and I Know My Own Heart KISSING THE WITCH Adapted from her book of thirteen revisionist fairy tales of the same name, this play interweaves four classic plots – Beauty and the Beast, Donkeyskin, the Goose Girl, the Little Mermaid – with an invented one about a desperate girl going to a witch for help. Kissing the Witch finds the gritty in the fantastical, and excavates magic to find what’s really going on. TRESPASSES Set over three days in 1661, Trespasses is inspired by the judge’s own account of one of the tiny handful of witch trials that ever took place in Ireland. It asks why a servant girl who fell into fits would have put the blame on an old beggarwoman – but also, more timeless questions about the clashing cultures that have to share a small island country. Trespasses is about faith and superstition, politics and class, sadism and love. LADIES AND GENTLEMEN This play with songs, set mostly in the dressing rooms of busy vaudeville theatres all over North America, was inspired by a real same-sex wedding that took place in Grand Rapids, Michigan, in 1886. It resurrects a ragtag troupe of emigrants - most notably, male impersonator Annie Hindle, ‘a man’s widow and a woman’s widower’, as the tabloids called her. With a light touch, Ladies and Gentleman explores the ways we perform our roles, both on and off stage. I KNOW MY OWN HEART Inspired by the secret coded diaries of Yorkshire gentlewoman Anne Lister, this play subverts all the conventions of Regency romance. Teasing out the entangled lives of mannish, arrogant Lister (nicknamed ''Gentleman Jack'') and three of her many lovers, I Know My Own Heart explores the different choices women made in a time of limits and prohibitions. DON’T DIE WONDERING When a restaurant cook loses her job because of a homophobic customer, she mounts a one-woman picket in protest. The police officer assigned to protect her is her nemesis from schooldays. This one-act comedy, set in a fictional small town, stages a battle between old and new elements of Irish culture.

In this sparkling collection of 19 stories, the bestselling author of Slammerkin returns to contemporary affairs, exposing the private dilemmas that result from public controversies.

From a writer of astonishing versatility and erudition, the much-admired literary critic, novelist, short-story writer, and scholar (“Dazzling”—The Washington Post; “One of those rare writers who seems to be able to work on any register, any time, any atmosphere, and make it her own” —The Observer), a book that explores the little-known literary tradition of love between women in Western literature, from Chaucer and Shakespeare to Charlotte Brontë, Dickens, Agatha Christie, and many more. Emma Donoghue brings to bear all her knowledge and grasp to examine how desire between women in English literature has been portrayed, from schoolgirls and vampires to runaway wives, from cross-dressing knights to contemporary murder stories. Donoghue looks at the work of those writers who have addressed the “unspeakable subject,” examining whether such desire between women is freakish or omnipresent, holy or evil, heartwarming or ridiculous as she excavates a long-obscured tradition of (inseparable) friendship between women, one that is surprisingly central to our cultural history. Donoghue writes about the half-dozen contrasting girl-girl plots that have been told and retold over the centuries, metamorphosing from generation to generation. What interests the author are the twists and turns of the plots themselves and how these stories have changed—or haven’t—over the centuries, rather than how they reflect their time and society. Donoghue explores the writing of Sade, Diderot, Balzac, Thomas Hardy, H. Rider Haggard, Elizabeth Bowen, and others and the ways in which the woman who desires women has been cast as not quite human, as ghost or vampire. She writes about the ever-present triangle, found in novels and plays from the last three centuries, in which a woman and man compete for the heroine’s love . . . about how—and why—same-sex attraction is surprisingly ubiquitous in crime fiction, from the work of Wilkie Collins and Dorothy L. Sayers to P. D. James. Finally, Donoghue looks at the plotline that has dominated writings about desire between women since the late nineteenth century: how a woman’s life is turned upside down by the realization that she desires another woman, whether she comes to terms with this discovery privately, “comes out of the closet,” or is publicly “outed.” She shows how this narrative pattern has remained popular and how it has taken many forms, in the works of George Moore, Radclyffe Hall, Patricia Highsmith, and Rita Mae Brown, from case-history-style stories and dramas, in and out of the courtroom, to schoolgirl love stories and rebellious picaresques. A revelation of a centuries-old literary tradition—brilliant, amusing, and until now, deliberately overlooked.

An “engaging . . . entertaining journey,” Landing explores the pleasures and sorrows of long-distance love in the digital age (The New York Times Book Review). Síle is a stylish citizen of the new Dublin, a veteran flight attendant who’s traveled the world. Jude is a twenty-five-year-old archivist, stubbornly attached to Ireland, Ontario, the tiny town in which she was born and raised. When Jude meets Síle on her first transatlantic plane trip, the spark between them is instant. After a coffee shared at Heathrow Airport, both women return to their lives—but neither can forget their encounter. Over the next year, Jude and Síle connect through emails, phone calls, letters, and the occasional visit. But no matter how passionate, every long-distance relationship comes to a crossroads, because you can’t have a happily ever after when the one you love is a world apart . . . “[Donoghue] explores with a light, sure touch the subject of desire across distances of various kinds: generational, cultural, even spiritual.” —The New York Times Book Review “[A] charming tale.” —Kirkus Reviews

Through an examination of a wealth of new medical, legal and erotic source material, together with re-readings of classics of English literature, Emma Donoghue uncovers the astonishing range of lesbian and bisexual identities described in British texts between 1668 and 1801.

The eagerly awaited sequel to The Lotterys Plus One! Sumac Lottery is the keeper of her family''s traditions -- from Pow Wow to Holi, Carnival to Hogmanay, Sumac''s on guard to make sure that no Lottery celebration gets forgotten. But this winter all Sumac''s seasonal plans go awry when a Brazilian visitor overstays his welcome. A terrible ice storm grounds all flights, so one of her dads and her favorite brother can''t make it home from India. And then the power starts going out across the city...Can Sumac hang on to the spirit of the season, even if nothing is going like a Lottery holiday should?

Emma Donoghue vividly brings to life stories inspired by her discoveries of fascinating, hidden scraps of the past. Here an engraving of a woman giving birth to rabbits, a plague ballad, surgical case notes, theological pamphlets, and an articulated skeleton are ingeniously fleshed out into rollicking, full-bodied fictions. Whether she''s spinning the tale of an English soldier tricked into marrying a dowdy spinster, a Victorian surgeon''s attempts to "improve" women, a seventeenth-century Irish countess who ran away to Italy disguised as a man, or an "undead" murderess returning for the maid she left behind to be executed in her place, Emma Donoghue brings to her tales a colorful, elegant prose filled with the sights and smells and sounds of the period. She summons the ghosts of those men and women who counted for nothing in their own day and brings them to unforgettable life in fiction.

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 in search of an isolated spot on which to found a monastery. Drifting out into the Atlantic, the three men find an impossibly steep, bare island inhabited by tens of thousands of birds, and claim it for God. In such a place, what will survival mean?

This "soul stirring" novel by the New York Times bestselling author of Room (O Magazine) is one of the New York Post''s best books of the year. Noah Selvaggio is a retired chemistry professor and widower living on the Upper West Side, but born in the South of France. He is days away from his first visit back to Nice since he was a child, bringing with him a handful of puzzling photos he''s discovered from his mother''s wartime years. But he receives a call from social services: Noah is the closest available relative of an eleven-year-old great-nephew he''s never met, who urgently needs someone to look after him. Out of a feeling of obligation, Noah agrees to take Michael along on his trip. Much has changed in this famously charming seaside mecca, still haunted by memories of the Nazi occupation. The unlikely duo, suffering from jet lag and culture shock, bicker about everything from steak frites to screen time. But Noah gradually comes to appreciate the boy''s truculent wit, and Michael''s ease with tech and sharp eye help Noah unearth troubling details about their family''s past. Both come to grasp the risks people in all eras have run for their loved ones, and find they are more akin than they knew. Written with all the tenderness and psychological intensity that made Room an international bestseller, Akin is a funny, heart-wrenching tale of an old man and a boy, born two generations apart, who unpick their painful story and start to write a new one together. "What begins as a larky story of unlikely male bonding turns into an off-center but far richer novel about the unheralded, imperfect heroism of two women." -- New York Times

The bestselling author of the adult novel Room bursts onto the children''s book scene with this cross between Little Miss Sunshine, Cheaper by the Dozen, and Modern Family. Sumac Lottery is nine years old and the self-proclaimed "good girl" of her (VERY) large, (EXTREMELY) unruly family. And what a family the Lotterys are: four parents, children both adopted and biological, and a menagerie of pets, all living and learning together in a sprawling house called Camelottery. Then one day, the news breaks that one of their grandfathers is suffering from dementia and will be coming to live with them. And not just any grandfather -- the long dormant "Grumps," who fell out with his son so long ago that he hasn''t been part of any of their lives.Suddenly, everything changes. Sumac has to give up her room to make the newcomer feel at home. She tries to be nice, but prickly Grumps clearly disapproves of how the Lotterys live: whole grains, strange vegetables, rescue pets, a multicultural household... He''s worse than just tough to get along with -- Grumps has got to go! But can Sumac help him find a home where he belongs?

A short story by Emma Donoghue from the collection Reader, I Married Him: Stories inspired by Jane Eyre.

In this profile, Emma Donoghue tells the story of two eccentric Victorian spinsters: Katherine Bradley (1846-1914) and her niece Edith Cooper (1862-1913); poets and lovers, who wrote together under the name of Michael Field. They wrote eleven volumes of poetry and thirty historical tragedies, but perhaps their best work - richest in emotional honesty and wit - was the diary that the two women shared for a quarter of a century, and these unpublished journals and letters form the basis for the groundbreaking We are Michael Field. The Michaels lived in a contradictory world of inherited wealth and terrible illness, silly nicknames and religious crises. They preferred men to women, and yet their greatest devotion was saved for their dog. Snobbish, arrogant eccentrics who faced bereavement and death with great courage, the Michaels never lost their appetite for life or their passion for each other.

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.

DRAGON. TIGRESS. SHE-DEVIL.For centuries past, and all across the worldHUSSY. SIREN. WENCH.there are words that have defined and decried us.HARRIDAN. MUCKRAKER. SPITFIRE.Words that raise our hacklesVITUPERATOR. CHURAIL. TERMAGANT.fire up our blood;FURY. WARRIOR. VIRAGO.words that tell a storyIn this blazing cauldron of a book, the boldest writers of our day take up these words and take up their pens, celebrating fifty years of Virago.

A girl thought to be a boy steals her sister''s skirt, while a boy thought to be a girl refuses to wear a cornflower blue dress. One boy''s love of a soldier leads to the death of a stranger. The present takes a bittersweet journey into the past when a man revisits the summer school where he had "an accidental romance." And a forgotten mother writes a poignant letter to the teenage daughter she hasn''t seen for fourteen years. Poised between the past and the future are the stories of now. In nontraditional narratives, short stories, and brief graphics, tales of anticipation and regret, eagerness and confusion present distinctively modern views of love, sexuality, and gender identification. Together, they reflect the vibrant possibilities available for young people learning to love others—and themselves—in today''s multifaceted and quickly changing world.

Una extraordinaria y cruda historia de amor y supervivencia. La novela en la que se basa la película ganadora del Óscar a la mejor actriz. «En parte libro de aventuras infantiles, en parte thriller adulto... Un libro que te romperá el corazón.» The Irish Times Para Jack, un niño de cinco años, la Habitación es el mundo entero, ellugar donde nació, donde come, juega y aprende. Por la noche, Mamá lo pone a dormir en el Armario, por si viene el Viejo Nick... Para su madre, la Habitación es el cubículo donde lleva siete años encerrada. Con gran tesón e ingenio, ha creado en ese reducido espacio una vida para su hijo, y su amor por él es lo único que le permite soportar lo insoportable. Pero la curiosidad de uno crece a la par que la desesperación de la otra. Solo queda urdir la huida, un plan más arriesgado de lo que ambos pueden llegar a imaginar. La habitación fue finalista del Premio Booker. La crítica ha dicho... «La Habitación es uno de los libros más profundamente conmovedores que he leído en mucho tiempo.» John Boyne, autor de El niño con el pijama de rayas «Una novela memorable... Una voz única para hablar acerca del amor y una mirada fresca y reveladora del mundo en que vivimos.» The New York Times Book Review «Donoghueha construido un relato que avanza con el suspense de un thriller... Difícil de abandonar e intensamente conmovedor.» The Sunday Times «Una obra de arte muy original... Una novela poderosa, de una belleza oscura y sumamente reveladora.» Michael Cunningham, autor de Las horas «La prosa de Emma Donoghue es pura alquimia, capaz de convertir la inocencia en horror y el horror en ternura. La Habitación se lee de un tirón y, cuando se acaba y levantas la vista, aunque el mundo parece el mismo, te sientes diferente, y esa sensación perdura durante días.» Audrey Niffenegger «Entendida como una fábula del amor madre-hijo, así como un antídoto a la lascivia que suele impregnar la novela negra, supone todo un triunfo y merece cosechar un gran éxito.» The Daily Telegraph «Una novela como ninguna otra... Un bello relato, absorbente y sincero.» The Observe