Room - Softcover

Donoghue, Emma

4.08

804,889 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1443413690 ISBN 13: 9781443413695

Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers, 2012

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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.

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Review:

Amazon Best of the Month, September 2010: In many ways, Jack is a typical 5-year-old. He likes to read books, watch TV, and play games with his Ma. But Jack is different in a big way--he has lived his entire life in a single room, sharing the tiny space with only his mother and an unnerving nighttime visitor known as Old Nick. For Jack, Room is the only world he knows, but for Ma, it is a prison in which she has tried to craft a normal life for her son. When their insular world suddenly expands beyond the confines of their four walls, the consequences are piercing and extraordinary. Despite its profoundly disturbing premise, Emma Donoghue's Room is rife with moments of hope and beauty, and the dogged determination to live, even in the most desolate circumstances. A stunning and original novel of survival in captivity, readers who enter Room will leave staggered, as though, like Jack, they are seeing the world for the very first time. --Lynette Mong

About the Author:

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.