Room [Hardcover]

Emma Donoghue does it so spectacularly that we are taken by surprise when, in the middle of the novel, resourceful Ma's escape plans swing into action.

The reader hurries on partly because Jack is so masterful a creation. Like John Boyne's Bruno in The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, he knows more than he understands. And the dramatic irony heightens the poignancy of the tale as it progresses into the third section, which deals with life after abduction.' --The Irish Independent

'On one level a simple story about and extreme situation, it is also a novel in the tradition of Gulliver's Travels, with Jack's perspective allowing Donoghue to hold the adult world up to an unfamiliar type of scrutiny.' -- The Sunday Times

'The story is told, with unsurpassed panache . . . Room will certainly be much garlanded, and it will deserve every prize it gets. Fantastic - but deeply, deeply disturbing.' --AN Wilson - Readers Digest

'Room is likely to attract comparisons with Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones and it deserves equal success . . . In the hands of a lesser author, Room could have felt both exploitative and sensationalist thanks to its subject matter. Instead, it makes the reader think about the importance of freedom and its costs. Above all though, it is a novel about the love between a mother and her child. Which is why, despite its darkest of settings, Room is an affecting and uplifting read.' --Evening Standard

'[Room] reads as smooth as ice-cream and Donoghue quickly builds a compelling view of this strange existence . . . as a life-affirming fable of parent-child love, and an antidote to the prurience of so much crime fiction, it's a triumph and deserves to be a hit.' --Daily Telegraph

'Room is set to be one of the big literary hits of the year . . . It is a brave act for a writer, but happily one that Donoghue, still only 40 but on her seventh novel, has the talent to pull off. For Room is in many ways what its publisher claims it to be: a novel like no other . . . To read this book is to stumble on a completely private world. Every family unit has its own language of codes and in-jokes, and Donoghue captures this exquisitely . . . the grotesque is consistently balanced with the uplifting and there is a moment, halfway through the novel, where you feel you would fight anyone who tried to wrestle it from your grasp with the same ferocity that Ma fights for Jack, such is the author's power to make out of the most vile circumstances something absorbing, truthful and beautiful . . . Jack's introduction to the confusing world of freedom is handled with incredible skill and delicacy . . . In the hands of this audacious novelist, Jack's talk is more than a victim-and-survivor story: it works as a study of child development, shows the power of language and storytelling, and is a kind of sustained poem in praise of motherhood and parental love.' --Observer

'This is a novel, and a child, that will not be confined . . . To this reader, at least, its effect is almost exhilarating.' -- Boyd Tonkin, Independent

'Set to be one of the big literary hits of the year . . . More than a victim-and-survivor story, it works as a study of child development, shows the power of language and storytelling, and is a kind of sustained poem in praise of motherhood and parental love.' --Observer

'This child's-eye view of the world may sound kooky, but it reads as smooth as ice-cream . . . As a life-affirming fable of parent-child love, and an antidote to the prurience of so much crime fiction, it's a triumph, and deserves to be a hit.' --Daily Telegraph

'Above all, it is a novel about the love between a mother and her child. Which is why, despite its darkest of settings, Room is an affecting and uplifting read.' --Evening Standard

'A heart-warming homage to the limitless capabilities of maternal love and the power of the imagination. An intriguing, beautiful read.' --Easy Living

'Taut, devastating and gripping, Room is the story of a mother and son whose love lets them survive the impossible.' --Psychologies Magazine

`A celebration of the freedoms we take for granted, and a gripping, moving read.' --Time Out

'A novel that has huge summer hit written all over it.' --Metro - Fiction of the Week

'Haunting and compelling.' -- Woman & Home

'Totally unique and intriguing. It kept us utterly hooked.' --Cosmopolitan

'The novel's beauty lies in how it celebrates survival without being simplistic or trite. Jack's experiences are extremely atypical but, through his combination of innocence and knowingness, Donoghue captures the universality of coming to an awareness of the world.' --Sunday Business Post

'No subject, no story, could be more overdetermined than that of Room: more shaped and structured by our carious ways of speaking about the mind, the self, the family, from linguistics and psychiatry to red-top frenzy and talk-show hysteria. Yet somehow, via the narrative voice of Jack and his stoic and heroic making-sensein words of his small world. It bursts free of ever preset category. This is a novel, and a child, that will not be confirmed. To stand on its own it must scale the intellectural walls that surround its theme . . . Bristling with a fiercely intelligent if unobtrusive grasp of the links between language, power andperception, Room marks both a fresh start for its author's fiction and in some ways, a deepening of its range.' --Independent

'Room is a chilling account of a young boy and his mother . . . What is in essence a horrifying tale, inspired by real-life instances of forced confinement, it is transformed into a heartwarming homage to the limitless capabilities of maternal love and the power of the imagination. An intriguing, beautiful read.' --Easy Living

'Taut, devastating and gripping, Room - inspired by the true story of Elisabeth Fritzl, imprisioned with her children by her father - is the story of a mother and son whose love lets them survive the impossible.' --Psychologies

'Donoghue manages to give her tale, and a truly horrendous scenario, a positive treatment while giving us a celebration of the freedoms we take for granted. A gripping, moving read.' --Time Out

'[Jack's] vocabulary is endearingly skew-whiff and his broken, lyrical speech patterns beautifully capture the intense, abnormal richness of the pair's sensory-deprived existence . . . a novel that has huge summer hit written all over it.' --Metro - Fiction of the Week

'Room and its contents take on their own character in this haunting and compelling novel.' --Woman & Home

'Totally unique and intriguing. It kept us utterly hooked.' --Cosmopolitan

`I've never read a more heart-bustlingly, gut wrenchingly compassionate novel . . . As for sweet, bright, funny Jack, I wanted to scoop him up out of the novel and never let him go. In him, Donoghue has created 21st-century fiction's most uniquely loveable voice. She deserves to win this year's Man Booker Prize.' --Daily Mail

`Riveting, funny, inventive, moving...an extraordinary novel and deserves its place among the books of the year.' --The Lady

`In filling this book with things that are both truly horrific and rather lovely, Emma Donoghue has achieved a work that is deeply unsettling on every level. It is a strange paradox that a book about imprisonment and torture should have become an arena for discussing the proper care and love of children. I think I am glad to have read it.' --Financial Times

`What saves this beautifully nuanced book from being in any way a voyeuristic reaction to true crime is less the descriptions of captivity than the inevitably changing nature of the child / parent relationship, which Donoghue explores here so minutely, recognisably and exultantly.' --Sunday Telegraph

'Although Room is entirely told from Jack's viewpoint, we learn much about Ma. As in Cormac McCarthy's The Road, we see how the love of a child in adversity can make a hero of an ordinary person...[an] intense and absorbing novel...So closely has Emma Donoghue made us identify with her characters that, through Jack's eyes, we can see our own world made new.' --Literary Review

'Room is a fascinating, engagingly written account of a child-parent relationship. Wider implications are that human beings need room of their own to remain true to themselves.' --Methodist Recorder

'Room ... has a way of turning difficult material into something life-enhancing, almost funny, but always engaging.' --Colm Toibin, Irish Times

'Booker-nominated novels rarely find their way on to my favourite lists, because I sometimes feel they're too clever for their own good, but Emma Donoghue's Room tackles a difficult and emotive subject in a truly brilliant way. The voice of the five-year-old narrator is superbly done.' --Sheila O'Flanagan, Irish Times

'Peppered with such moments of love and poignancy between Jack and his mother as to be almost uplifting.' --Glamour