Room - Couverture souple

Born in Dublin in 1969, EMMA DONOGHUE is a novelist, screenwriter and playwright who lives in Canada. Her novel Room won the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize (Canada/Caribbean) and was shortlisted for the Man Booker and Orange Prizes, selling more than two million copies. Donoghue scripted the Canadian-Irish film of Room which was nominated for four Academy Awards, including Best Picture. Her fiction (short and long) ranges from the contemporary (Stir-fry, Hood, Landing, Touchy Subjects) to the historical (Slammerkin, The Sealed Letter, Astray, Frog Music).  Donoghue’s books for young readers are The Lotterys Plus One and The Lotterys More Or Less. Her last novel for adults, The Wonder, was shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize.

To five-year-old Jack, Room is the world. It’s where he was born. It’s where he and Ma eat and sleep and play and learn. There are endless wonders that let loose Jack’s imagination: the snake under Bed that he constructs out of eggshells; the imaginary world projected through the TV; the coziness of Wardrobe, where Ma tucks him in safely at night, in case Old Nick comes.

Room is home to Jack, but to Ma, it’s the prison where she’s been held since she was nineteen—for seven long years. Through her fierce love for her son, she has created a life for him in that eleven-by-eleven-foot space. But Jack’s curiosity is building alongside Ma’s own desperation, and she knows that Room cannot contain either indefinitely.

Told in the inventive, funny and poignant voice of Jack, Room is a celebration of resilience—and a powerful story of a mother and son whose love lets them survive the impossible.