Summer of Canadian Reading 2019

#1 International Bestseller and an Award-Winning Motion Picture

Winner of the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize; the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best Book (Canada and Caribbean region); the CBA Libris Award for Fiction Book of the Year; the Hughes & Hughes Irish Novel of the Year; and finalist for the Man Booker and Orange Prizes

To five-year-old Jack, Room is the world . . .

It’s where he was born. It’s where he and Ma eat and sleep and play and learn. There are endless wonders that let loose Jack’s imagination—the snake under Bed that he constructs out of eggshells; the imaginary world projected through the TV; the coziness of Wardrobe beneath Ma’s clothes, where she tucks him in safely at night, in case Old Nick comes.

Room is home to Jack, but to Ma, it’s the prison where she’s been held since she was nineteen—for seven long years. Through her fierce love for her son, she has created a life for him in that eleven-by-eleven-foot space. But Jack’s curiosity is building alongside Ma’s own desperations, and she knows that Room cannot contain either indefinitely . . .

Told in the inventive, funny and poignant voice of Jack, Room is a celebration of resilience—and a powerful story of a mother and son whose love lets them survive the impossible.

EMMA DONOGHUE was born in Dublin and lived in England for many years before moving to Canada. She writes in many genres, including theatre, radio drama and literary history, but is best known for her fiction, both historical (Slammerkin, The Sealed Letter, Astray, Frog Music) and contemporary (Stir-Fry, Hood, Landing, Touchy Subjects). Her seventh novel, Room, won the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize (Canada and the Caribbean region) and was shortlisted for the Man Booker and Orange Prizes. It sold more than two million copies. Donoghue scripted the film adaptation, a Canadian-Irish film by Lenny Abrahamson starring Brie Larson, which was nominated for four Academy Awards, including Best Picture. And her most recent novel, The Wonder, was shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize in 2016.

Emma Donoghue's profile page

• OLA Evergreen Award

“Claustrophobic, controversial, brilliant . . . inventive, tense, and stringently intelligent.” — Maclean's

“Remarkable . . . heartrending. . . . Both gripping and poignant, it’s a tribute to human resourcefulness and resilience and extremity, and a stirring portrait of a mother’s devotion.” — Toronto Star

“An astounding, terrifying novel.” — The New Yorker

“Thrilling and at moments palm-sweatingly harrowing.” — New York Times Book Review