Donoghue Scoops Top Award
'Room', the bestselling novel by Emma Donoghue which just missed out on the Man Booker Prize last month, has taken the Novel of the Year prize at the Bord Gais Energy Irish Book Awards 2010.
Emma Donoghue's winning novel was inspired by the case of Josef Fritzl who locked his daughter in the basement for 24 years. and has been in the bestseller lists for the past three months.
It tells the story of a boy and his mother who are held in a one-room garden shed.
The five-year-old boy thinks the locked room he lives in is the whole world because his mother has never told him about the outside. At night the boy hides in the wardrobe when Old Nick brings food and then makes the bed creak with his mother.
Despite the dark subject matter, the book is ultimately uplifting and the boy and his mother eventually escape.
"I was driving along when 'Room' came to me in a flash," Donoghue says. "I realised that if such a story were told from the child's point of view, it would not be a horror or sob story, but a journey from one world to another.
Originally from Dublin, but now living in Canada, Donoghue is best known for her historical novels.
Read our own book club review of 'Room'
under this month's Popular Posts.
under this month's Popular Posts.
You will see we are a tough bunch!!
Full Short List 2010
Let the Great World Spin, Colum McCann, Bloomsbury
Brooklyn, Colm Toibin, Viking
Skippy Dies, Paul Murray, Hamish Hamilton
Ghost Light, Joseph O’Connor, Harvill Secker
The Dead Republic, Roddy Doyle, Cape
Room, Emma Donoghue, Pan Macmillan
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