Astray - Emma Donoghue

Counterfeiter. Dishwasher. Pr0stitute. Attorney. Sculptor. Mercenary. Elephant. Corpse. The fascinating characters that roam across the pages of Emma Donoghue's latest fact-inspired fictions have all gone astray: they are emigrants, runaways, drifters. They cross other borders, too: those of race, law, sex and sanity. They travel for love or money, incognito or under duress. Donoghue describes the brutal plot hatched by a slave in conjunction with his master's wife to set them both free; she draws out the difficulties of gold mining in the Yukon, even in the supposedly plentiful early days, and she takes us to a 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 2012 Sunday Times Short Story Award. Astray is a sequence of fourteen stories by the prize-winning author of Room and The Sealed Letter. These strange, true tales light up four centuries of wanderings, offering a past made up of deviations, and a surprising and moving history for restless times.

ISBN: 9781447211952

Pages: 274

Trade paperback

Penguin Books, 2006

Good condition

B148