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.

 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

Room by Emma Donoghue - Book Club

Room by Emma Donoghue will be reviewed next week by a Book Club that has been mad enough to allow 120 Socks to be a member.

The book is well worth a read, and I look forward to posting feedback from our Book Club when we get together.  But in the interim, here is one of the reams of articles written about this book, which was incidentally short-listed this year for the Booker Prize. Also of note is that Emma Donoghue is Irish, so all in all it is well worth supporting.!

'The universe of Donoghue's docu-novel is a garden shed that is home to five-year-old Jack, the storyteller, and his devoted Ma, abducted at 18, and who is now fading in and out of black depression. There's a tyrannical occasional visitor, Old Nick, on whom the pair depend for food, light and heat -- for life itself. He calls usually when Jack is tucked into his bed in the wardrobe.  In no time, this room becomes a hellish world for the reader, as well as for Jack and Ma. Life revolves around finding ways of making the days pass. You play games; word games, mostly. You exercise. Today. Again tomorrow. And tomorrow, like yesterday.

Like John Boyne's Bruno in The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, he knows more than he understands. Jack does not fit into the accepted moulds of boyhood. Since he does not share the assumptions that help make sense of the world, a chasm yawns between him and 'Outside'.

The novel is as much about empathising with suffering at the extreme of the spectrum as about our society's expectations.  Donoghue's great strength - apart from her storytelling gift - is her emotional intelligence.  We get enough information to feel uncomfortable - and therefore to question our assumptions about how family life ought to be; and to know that life will always be an unequal struggle.'