Haven
From the Sunday Times bestselling author of Room
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- 5,99 €
Publisher Description
A story of survival set in 600 AD Ireland; a parable of patriarchy, destruction and religion at sea, by Emma Donoghue, the bestselling author of Room.
'Everything a novel should be: compassionate, unpredictable, and questioning. Haven is Donoghue at her strange, unsettling best.' - Maggie O'Farrell, author of Hamnet
Shortlisted for the Dublin Literary Award
In seventh-century Ireland, a priest has a dream telling him to leave the sinful world behind. Taking two monks with him, he travels down the Shannon in search of an isolated spot on which to found a new place of worship. 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. But in such a place, far from all other humanity, what will survival mean?
‘Haven is a beautiful, bold blaze of a book’ – Rachel Joyce, author of The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry
‘Beautiful and timely’ - Sarah Moss, author of Summerwater
‘Sinister, heart-wrenching and beautifully written’ – The Times
‘Combines pressure-cooker intensity and radical isolation, to stunning effect’ – Margaret Atwood via Twitter
‘Book of the Year’ pick in The Irish Times, The Guardian, The Irish Post, RTÉ and The Times.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Donoghue (The Pull of the Stars) returns with an intricate slow-burn about three monks who start a monastery on an isolated island in seventh-century Ireland. As it opens, priest Artt dreams about an island where he believes he's to pilgrimage with two others to found a monastic retreat. He picks the old monk Cormac, a skilled builder and gardener, and the young monk Trian, a piper, and both men pledge their lives to him. They set off on a small boat in search of the haven, and on the fifth day they see two islands jutting from the water. They land on the bigger one, a steep cathedral of rock possessed by an army of birds. There, high on a plateau, Artt, the future prior, decides they will camp then build, soon putting Cormac to work on a great cross and Trian on copying the Bible. As the prior turns a deaf ear to the others' concerns about dwindling supplies, tensions rise over his monastic demands and their narrowing chances of survival as summer dips into fall. The slow pacing tends to wear, but the narrative picks up toward the end with a surprising twist. Patient readers will be rewarded with a thoughtful tale of faith, isolation, and blind obedience.
