Astray
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3.0 • 1 Rating
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- £5.99
Publisher Description
This fascinating, fact-inspired fiction collection from Emma Donoghue, author of the bestselling Room, is a sequence of fourteen stories about travels to, in, and from North America.
With the turn of each page, the characters that roam across these pages go astray. They are emigrants, runaways, drifters; gold miners and counterfeiters, attorneys and slaves. They cross borders of race, law, sex, and sanity. They travel for love or money, under duress or incognito.
Donoghue describes the brutal plot hatched by a slave in conjunction with his master's wife to set them both free, and takes us to an early Puritan community in Massachusetts unsettled by an invented sex scandal. Astray also includes 'The Hunt', a shocking confession of one soldier's violent betrayal during the American Revolution, which was shortlisted for the Sunday Times Short Story Award.
These strange, true tales light up four centuries of wanderings, offering a past in scattered pieces, and a surprising and moving history for restless times.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The stories in Donoghue's new collection all come, to varying degrees, from historical records; the author of Room, who studied 18th-century literature at Cambridge, has a gift for reading historical documents and picking out the odd, telling detail. There's the Plymouth Plantation man who accuses his neighbors of indecency, in "The Lost Seed"; the woman who gives her daughter up for adoption, then writes the Children's Aid Society demanding her return, in "The Gift"; the Tammany Hall bigwig found to be a woman, in "Daddy's Girl"; all outlines begging to be filled in. The 14 stories are all short (many too short), and by the time they've set up the circumstances and the era, they're almost done, and we're leaving characters we know as creatures of a time and place rather than individuals. When Donoghue establishes a distinct voice and person, the stories are vivid, curious, and honest: we'll remember the serial Puritan accuser and the young German soldier in revolutionary America long after we've forgotten other characters like Jumbo the Victorian elephant and his keeper or the men who tried to hold Abraham Lincoln's body for ransom in stories that are notable more for the historical moments they reconstruct than for the people who inhabit them.
