Tag: Emma Donoghue

2017 Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year

The 2017 Kerry Group Novel of the Year Award shortlist

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Writers' Week

Now that my Stella Prize reading is over, it’s time to shift my attention to another literary project: the Kerry Group Novel of the Year.

This is one of my favourite book prizes. It’s an annual award — worth €15,000 — for Irish fiction. Over the years it has introduced me to some brilliant reads — The Cold Eye of Heaven by Christine Dwyer Hickey and TransAtlantic by Colum McCann, to name but two — so I usually pay attention to it.

This year the winner will be announced at the opening ceremony of Writers’ Week at Listowel, in Kerry, Ireland on 31 May. Before then I hope to have read all five titles on the shortlist.

Below is a list of the books, in alphabetical order by author name, including a synopsis. Hyperlinks will take you to my reviews. Do keep coming back to this post as I will update the hyperlinks as and when I review each title.

Inch Levels
Inch Levels by Neil Hegarty
“Patrick Jackson lies on his deathbed in Derry and recalls a family history marked by secrecy and silence, and a striking absence of conventional pieties. He remembers the death of an eight-year-old girl, whose body was found on reclaimed land called Inch Levels on the shoreline of Lough Swilly. And he is visited by his beloved but troubled sister Margaret and by his despised brother-in-law Robert, and by Sarah, his hard, unchallengeable mother. Each of them could talk about events in the past that might explain the bleakness of their relationships, but leaving things unsaid has become a way of life. Guilt and memory beat against them, as shock waves from bombs in Derry travel down the river to shake the windows of those who have escaped the city.”

My Name is Leon 

My Name is Leon by Kit de Waal
“Leon is nine, and has a perfect baby brother called Jake. They have gone to live with Maureen, who has fuzzy red hair like a halo, and a belly like Father Christmas. But the adults are speaking in low voices, and wearing Pretend faces. They are threatening to give Jake to strangers. Since Jake is white and Leon is not. As Leon struggles to cope with his anger, certain things can still make him smile — like Curly Wurlys, riding his bike fast downhill, burying his hands deep in the soil, hanging out with Tufty (who reminds him of his dad), and stealing enough coins so that one day he can rescue Jake and his mum. Evoking a Britain of the early eighties, My Name is Leon is a heart-breaking story of love, identity and learning to overcome unbearable loss. Of the fierce bond between siblings. And how – just when we least expect it – we manage to find our way home.”


The Wonder by Emma Donoghue
“An eleven-year-old girl stops eating, but remains miraculously alive and well. A nurse, sent to investigate whether she is a fraud, meets a journalist hungry for a story. Set in the Irish Midlands in the 1850s, Emma Donoghue’s The Wonder — inspired by numerous European and North American cases of ‘fasting girls’ between the sixteenth century and the twentieth — is a psychological thriller about a child’s murder threatening to happen in slow motion before our eyes. Pitting all the seductions of fundamentalism against sense and love, it is a searing examination of what nourishes us, body and soul.”

Solar Bones
Solar Bones by Mike McCormack
“Once a year, on All Souls Day, it is said that the dead may return; Solar Bones tells the story of one such visit. Set in the west of Ireland as the recession is about to strike, this novel is a portrait of one man’s experience when his world threatens to fall apart. Wry and poignant, Solar Bones is an intimate portrayal of one family, capturing how careless decisions ripple out into waves, and how our morals are challenged in small ways every day.”

Nothing on earth
Nothing on Earth by Conor O’Callaghan
“It is the hottest August in living memory. A frightened girl bangs on a door. A man answers. From the moment he invites her in, his world will never be the same again. She will tell him about her family, and their strange life in the show home of an abandoned housing estate. The long, blistering days spent sunbathing; the airless nights filled with inexplicable noises; the words that appear on the windows, written in dust. Why are members of her family disappearing, one by one? Is she telling the truth? Is he? In a world where reality is beginning to blur, how can we know what to believe?”

Have you read any of these books? Or have any piqued your interest?

2016 Giller Prize, Author, Book review, Emma Donoghue, Fiction, historical fiction, Ireland, Picador, Publisher, Setting

‘The Wonder’ by Emma Donoghue

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the-wonder-emma-d

Fiction – hardcover; Picador; 292 pages; 2016. Review copy courtesy of the publisher

It seems rather uncanny that the first two books I’ve read from the 2016 Giller Prize shortlist both happen to revolve around food and fasting, albeit set centuries and continents apart.

In Mona Awad’s 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl we meet an unhappy woman obsessed with staying thin; in Emma Donoghue’s The Wonder we meet a pious and joyful 11 year old girl who appears to be surviving on nothing but air. Awad’s is a thoroughly contemporary novel set in urban Canada; Donoghue’s is an historical novel set in rural Ireland. But while both novels feature complicated females starving themselves, they are doing so for very different reasons…

Starving to get into heaven?

The Wonder takes place just seven years after the end of the Great Famine, which occurred between 1845 and 1852. The time period is important, because Anna O’Donnell, the girl at the heart of the story, was born into hunger, but now food is relatively plentiful again. This makes it almost sacrilegious for her to shun it. But that is what she does. Yet, in her refusal to eat, she has not become ill, nor withered away: she is supposedly fit and healthy and has attracted much attention from the Catholic community in which she lives. Anna is being billed as a saint, and people are prepared to travel for miles and miles, just to catch a glimpse of her.

Enter nurse Lib Wright, a young widow from England, who trained under Florence Nightingale on the frontline of the Crimean War. She’s a new breed of nurse: professional, ethical and thorough. But she’s also a non-believer — in God, in religion, in Anna’s ability to live without food — which immediately posits her as an outsider in a country that is deeply religious.

Lib’s job is to keep watch over Anna for two weeks to see whether she is sustaining herself on food acquired secretly. She’s been hired by a local quack, Dr McBrearty, who claims he wants to “bring the truth to light, whatever the truth may be”. A local nun, Sister Michael, is to share the shift work — eight hours at a time around the clock.

From the outset, Lib is suspicious of everyone’s motivations and believes the girl to be a faker. But how does she prove it? And if the girl, who is well-mannered and bright, is somehow eating on the sly, how is she doing it? And who is helping her?

A detective story

Essentially, The Wonder is a detective story, but it’s not a terribly clever one, for I had figured out the solution long before it was revealed. But as a slice of historical fiction it’s a superb snapshot of a time and place on the outer fringes of Western Europe, where dogma and religion are a way of life. (It is Lib’s constant inability to understand the rituals of Catholicism and to dismiss most of its beliefs as mere fairytale that makes me wonder if the author, presumably a lapsed Catholic, isn’t having a pop at the Church?)

The first third of this book really held me in its sway as I got to know and like the central characters: sweet pious Anna and stern and determined Lib, nursing troubles of her own. Everyone else is relatively subsidiary to them until the journalist William Byrne, from the Irish Times, enters the equation. But then the story seems to run out of steam — there’s only so much you can say about a girl fasting herself that you haven’t already said in earlier chapters — until momentum picks up again around 60 pages from the end when Donoghue drops a little bombshell that changes the course of the narrative.

Yet, when all’s said and done, The Wonder didn’t have enough meat on the bones for me (pun fully intended), because the storyline was simply too thin (sorry, can’t help myself) to sustain almost 300 pages of prose. And the ending was predictable and disappointing.

This might make it sound like I didn’t like the book. The funny thing is I liked it a lot — the writing is gorgeous, the characters are deftly drawn, the mood of the room in which Anna resides is evocative to the point of feeling claustrophobic (well, the author’s had some experience writing about that kind of space before, hasn’t she?) and her depiction of the outsider coming up against a culture she doesn’t understand is spot on. I also very much liked the interaction between the nurse and her patient, and the way this changed over time as the pair developed a genuine fondness for each other.

The Wonder is, indeed, a good read — but that’s all it is. I enjoyed it, but it didn’t wow me. I’d be very surprised if it won the Giller Prize.

This is my 2nd book for the #ShadowGiller2016

This is my 1st book for the 2017 Kerry Group Novel of the Year Award

2016 Giller Prize

The 2016 Giller Prize shortlist

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Giller Prize shortlist logoEarlier today, the shortlist for the 2016 Giller Prize was announced in Canada.

The shortlisted titles are:

I plan on reviewing all the titles as part of my participation in the Shadow Giller jury. Do keep coming back to this post as I will update the hyperlinks above as and when I review each title.

The winner of the $100,000 prize will be announced on 7 November. The Shadow Giller will name our winner a couple of days beforehand.

2016 Giller Prize

The 2016 Giller Prize longlist

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Giller Prize longlist

I’m interrupting my #ReadingAustralia2016 project to celebrate that time of year I look forward to most: Giller Prize season!

Longtime followers of this blog will know that I have taken part in shadowing Canada’s most prestigious literary prize since 2011. Sadly, the chair of our shadow jury, Kevin Peterson, died earlier this year, but we’ve decided to honour Kevin’s memory by continuing to shadow the prize once again. You can find out more about that on Kevin’s blog, which I’m now managing with his wife’s blessing.

The longlist for the 2016 prize was announced last week. The list comprises 10 novels and two short story collections by a mix of mainstream publishers and independent presses.

There won’t be enough time to read the entire longlist before the shortlist is announced, but once the shortlist is known I will be reading and reviewing them all, as per usual, so expect some Canadian reviews to pop up in and amongst the Australian ones over the next couple of months.

The Giller Prize longlist (in alphabetical order by author’s surname) is as follows:

13 ways of looking at a fat girl
13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl by Mona Awad
“Growing up in the suburban hell of Misery Saga (a.k.a. Mississauga), Lizzie has never liked the way she looks — even though her best friend Mel says she’s the pretty one. She starts dating guys online, but she’s afraid to send pictures, even when her skinny friend China does her makeup: she knows no one would want her if they could really see her. So she starts to lose weight. With punishing drive, she counts almonds consumed, miles logged, pounds dropped. She fights her way into coveted dresses. She grows up and gets thin, navigating double-edged validation from her mother, her friends, her husband, her reflection in the mirror. But no matter how much she loses, will she ever see herself as anything other than a fat girl?”

yiddish-for-pirates
Yiddish for Pirates by Gary Barwin (Not currently published in the UK)
“Set in the years around 1492, Yiddish for Piratesrecounts the compelling story of Moishe, a Bar Mitzvah boy who leaves home to join a ship’s crew, where he meets Aaron, the polyglot parrot who becomes his near-constant companion. From a present-day Florida nursing home, this wisecracking yet poetic bird guides us through a world of pirate ships, Yiddish jokes and treasure maps. But Inquisition Spain is a dangerous time to be Jewish and Moishe joins a band of hidden Jews trying to preserve some forbidden books. He falls in love with a young woman, Sarah; though they are separated by circumstance, Moishe’s wanderings are motivated as much by their connection as by his quest for loot and freedom. When all Jews are expelled from Spain, Moishe travels to the Caribbean with the ambitious Christopher Columbus, a self-made man who loves his creator. Moishe eventually becomes a pirate and seeks revenge on the Spanish while seeking the ultimate booty: the Fountain of Youth.”

pillow
Pillow by Andrew Battershill
“Most of the things Pillow really liked to do were obviously morally wrong. He wasn’t an idiot; clearly it was wrong to punch people in the face for money. But there had been an art to it, and it had been thrilling and thoughtful for him. The zoo was also evil, a jail for animals who’d committed no crimes, but he just loved it. The way Pillow figured it, love wasn’t about goodness, it wasn’t about being right, loving the very best person, having the most ethical fun. Love was about being alone and making some decisions. Pillow loves animals. Especially the exotic ones. Which is why he chooses the zoo for the drug runs he does as a low-level enforcer for a crime syndicate run by Andre Breton. He doesn’t love his life of crime, but he isn’t cut out for much else, what with all the punches to the head he took as a professional boxer.And now that he’s accidentally but sort of happily knocked up his neighbor, he wants to get out and go straight. But first there’s the matter of some stolen coins, possibly in the possession of George Bataille, which leads Pillow on a bizarre caper that involves kidnapping a morphine-addled Antonin Artaud, some corrupt cops, a heavy dose of Surrealism, and a quest to see some giraffes.”

stranger
Stranger by David Bergen (Not currently published in the UK)
“Íso, a young Guatemalan woman, works at a fertility clinic at Ixchel, in the highlands of the Sierra Madre de Chiapas. She tends to the rich northern women who visit the clinic hoping that the waters of the nearby lake might increase their chances of conception. Like many of the women working at the clinic, Íso is aware of the resident American doctor, Eric Mann. Soon Íso is his secret lover, stealing away with Dr. Mann on long motorcycle rides through the mountains and enjoying beach vacations with Eric and his doctor friends. But their tryst does not last long. Dr. Mann decides he will return to the US, and a freak accident cuts the couple’s time together even shorter. Before Íso can tell Dr. Mann that she is pregnant, he is gone. After the birth of her daughter, the baby is taken from her. The director of the clinic informs Íso that her child is in America. Determined to reclaim her stolen daughter, Íso makes her way north through Mexico, eventually crossing illegally into a United States divided into military zones. Travelling without documentation, and with little money, Íso descends into a world full of danger. In a place of shifting boundaries, Íso must determine who she can trust and how much, aware that she might lose her daughter forever.”

the-wonder
The Wonder by Emma Donoghue (Due to be published in the UK on 22 September)
“An eleven-year-old girl stops eating, but remains miraculously alive and well. A nurse, sent to investigate whether she is a fraud, meets a journalist hungry for a story. Set in the Irish Midlands in the 1850s, The Wonder — inspired by numerous European and North American cases of ‘fasting girls’ between the sixteenth century and the twentieth — is a psychological thriller about a child’s murder threatening to happen in slow motion before our eyes. Pitting all the seductions of fundamentalism against sense and love, it is a searing examination of what nourishes us, body and soul.”

party-wall
The Party Wall by Catherine Leroux
“Catherine Leroux’s The Party Wall shifts between and ties together stories about pairs joined in surprising ways. A woman learns that she may not be the biological mother of her own son despite having given birth to him; a brother and sister unite, as their mother dies, to search for their long-lost father; two young sisters take a detour home, unaware of the tragedy that awaits; and a political couple — when the husband accedes to power in a post-apocalyptic future state — is shaken by the revelation of their own shared, if equally unknown, history.”

the-two-of-us
The Two of Us by Kathy Page
“The stories in this collection focus on pairs: intense one-on-one relationships and encounters. Characters undergo genetic testing, garden, overeat, starve themselves, travel, fall pregnant, all while simultaneously driving each other towards moments where they —sometimes unwillingly — glimpse the meaning and shape of their lives, and who they might become.”

death-valley
Death Valley by Susan Perly
“Legendary war photographer Vivienne Pink has five days to photograph servicemen about to deploy for active combat. Racing to meet her deadline, she heads to Las Vegas, where she ll capture images of men who may die the next day and where she ll confront an abuser from her past to force a reckoning. Accompanied by her husband, a celebrated novelist, and her best friend, a former CIA spook, Vivienne heads out into the Nevada desert in search of adrenaline, vengeance and the perfect shot. Told in a vivid, hallucinogenic realism, Death Valley is a sexy, fast-paced tale that s part Pynchon, part Tarantino.”

willem-de-koonings-paintbrush
Willem De Kooning’s Paintbrush by Kerry Lee Powell (Not currently published in the UK)
“An unflinching and masterful collection of award-winning stories, Willem de Kooning’s Paintbrush is a career-making debut. Ranging from an island holiday gone wrong to a dive bar on the upswing to a yuppie mother in a pricey subdivision seeing her worst fears come true, these deftly written stories are populated by barkeeps, good men down on their luck, rebellious teens, lonely immigrants, dreamers and realists, fools and quiet heroes. In author Kerry-Lee Powell’s skillful hands, each character, no matter what their choices, is deeply human in their search for connection. Powell holds us in her grasp, exploring with a black humour themes of belonging, the simmering potential for violence and the meaning of art no matter where it is found, and revealing with each story something essential about the way we see the world.”

by-gaslight
By Gaslight by Steven Price
“William Pinkerton’s father, legendary founder of the Pinkerton Detective Agency, has died. He had managed to catch every criminal that crossed his path, except one: the mysterious thief Edward Shade. In the winter following his father‘s death, William travels to London to investigate a new lead. But when that lead is found dismembered in the River Thames, he is drawn into the dark orbit of a mysterious man called Adam Foole, who claims to know the truth… if only William can discover what that truth is. Set during the early infancy of crime detection, when photography and fingerprinting were only just beginning to be employed, and travelling from the gold mines of South Africa to the battlefields of the American Civil War, By Gaslight is the remarkable story of two shadowy men, William and Adam – who they are, what they have done and what they are hiding, both from each other and from themselves.”

Do Not Say We Have Nothing by Madeliene Thien
Do Not Say We Have Nothing by Madeleine Thien
“In Canada in 1991, ten-year-old Marie and her mother invite a guest into their home: a young woman who has fled China in the aftermath of the Tiananmen Square protests. Her name is Ai-Ming. As her relationship with Marie deepens, Ai-Ming tells the story of her family in revolutionary China, from the crowded teahouses in the first days of Chairman Mao’s ascent to the Shanghai Conservatory in the 1960s and the events leading to the Beijing demonstrations of 1989. It is a history of revolutionary idealism, music, and silence, in which three musicians, the shy and brilliant composer Sparrow, the violin prodigy Zhuli, and the enigmatic pianist Kai struggle during China’s relentless Cultural Revolution to remain loyal to one another and to the music they have devoted their lives to. Forced to re-imagine their artistic and private selves, their fates reverberate through the years, with deep and lasting consequences for Ai-Ming – and for Marie.”

The best kind of people
The Best Kind of People by Zoe Whittall (Not currently published in the UK)
“What if someone you trusted was accused of the unthinkable? George Woodbury, an affable teacher and beloved husband and father, is arrested for sexual impropriety at a prestigious prep school. His wife, Joan, vaults between denial and rage as the community she loved turns on her. Their daughter, Sadie, a popular over-achieving high school senior, becomes a social pariah. Their son, Andrew, assists in his father’s defense, while wrestling with his own unhappy memories of his teen years. A local author tries to exploit their story, while an unlikely men’s rights activist attempts to get Sadie onside their cause. With George locked up, how do the members of his family pick up the pieces and keep living their lives? How do they defend someone they love while wrestling with the possibility of his guilt?”

 

The shortlist will be announced on Monday 26 September, and the winner of the $100,000 prize named on Monday 7 November.

To find out more about the Scotiabank Giller Prize, please visit the official website.

Books of the year

My favourite books of 2010

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Books-of-the-yearIt’s that time of year again when everyone shares their best reads of 2010.

I’ve read so many wonderful books this year that I’ve narrowed it down by only including novels, as opposed to novellas or non-fiction titles.

Here’s my list (in alphabetical order by book title — click on the book’s title to see my review in full:

 

 

Beijing Coma

‘Beijing Coma’ by Ma Jian (2009)

At more than 600-pages long, it requires a major commitment from the reader, but it is worth the effort. It is a deeply moving account of the 1989 student pro-democracy movement, culminating in the massacre in which thousands of Chinese citizens were killed. Unusually, it is told from the point of view of one of the students, Dai Wei, who is in a coma. As a concept, this shouldn’t work. But in Ma Jian’s hands this wholly original approach is devastatingly effective.

The-Canal

‘The Canal’ by Lee Rourke (2010)

The Canal might be a book about boredom, but there’s little or no risk of evoking that emotional state in the reader. This is a novel pulsing with ideas and theories (and lots of facts about London, if you’re that way inclined), and one that’s likely to tell you more about the human condition than any textbook possibly could.

Of-a-Boy

‘Of A Boy’ by Sonya Hartnett (2003)

The real strength of this story, which is written in plain, languid prose, is Hartnett’s uncanny ability to get inside the head of a lonely school boy. She underplays everything, so it is you the reader who comes to understand the pain of his existence.

Room

‘Room’ by Emma Donoghue (2010)

The novel, which is Donoghue’s seventh, is an extraordinarily atmospheric read. I use the term ‘atmospheric’ to describe the feelings it evokes in the reader and the ways in which those feelings linger for days afterwards. I found myself not so much reeling in its wake but feeling as if something had shifted inside of me, so that I could no longer perceive the world in the same way.

A-Short-Gentleman

‘A Short Gentleman’ by Jon Canter (2009)

I think the funniest thing about the book (and admittedly the first half is more hilarious than the second half) is the way in which it pokes fun at Britain’s upper-classes. Their eccentricities, the ways in which they run their households and conduct their lives all come in for more than their fair share of ribbing.

Skin-lane

‘Skin Lane’ by Neil Bartlett (2008)

I have not read anything quite as haunting as this strangely beautiful book. It’s a novel that is full of contradictions: it brims with sexual tension, and yet contains no sex; it is filled with death, and yet no one is murdered; it’s repetitious to the point of being dull, and yet features some of the most exciting and heart-hammering scenes you will ever read.

The Slap

‘The Slap’ by Christos Tsiolkas (2009)

The Slap is by no means a perfect novel — sometimes the writing feels forced, especially when sketching in the back story for individual characters, and I suspect the numerous music references are going to date it quickly — but its ambition, its scope and the sheer force of the story-telling more than makes up for this. It’s a very bold book, full of sex, drugs, middle-aged angst and a lot of crude language.

So-much-for-that

‘So Much For That’ by Lionel Shriver (2010)

I can’t exaggerate how much I enjoyed this book. I lived with these characters for an entire weekend (the book arrived on a Saturday morning and by the Sunday night I had finished it) and felt like I’d gone on a huge, emotional roller-coaster that lasted almost 48 hours. It made me laugh, it made me cry and it made me angry.

This-human-season

‘This Human Season’ by Louise Dean (2006)

What I admire most about this book is Dean’s clear-eyed ability to reveal the human angle of The Troubles rather than concentrate on the politics of the situation. She never glorifies the violence or takes sides. Perhaps her own background — she is English, middle-class and lives in France — has helped her look at events with an outsider’s cool objectivity.

This-is-how

‘This is How’ by MJ Hyland (2010)

This Is How is far from a cheery read. Despite the loathsome character at its heart, it’s strangely compelling. It’s dark, disturbing and filled with pathos, but it is exactly this kind of exploration of a fragile mind that everyone should read, not because it offers condemnation, but because it does the opposite: illuminates and educates.

Have you read any from this list? Care to share your own top 10?

Author, Book review, Emma Donoghue, Fiction, literary fiction, Picador, Publisher, Setting, USA

‘Room’ by Emma Donoghue

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Room

Fiction – hardcover; Picador; 320 pages; 2010. Review copy courtesy of the publisher.

I had not planned to review Emma Donoghue’s Room quite so soon after reading it. But then it was named on the Booker Prize longlist on Tuesday and I figured now was a good a time as any to share my thoughts.

The novel, which is Donoghue’s seventh, is an extraordinarily atmospheric read. I use the term “atmospheric” to describe the feelings it evokes in the reader and the ways in which those feelings linger for days afterwards. I found myself not so much reeling in its wake but feeling as if something had shifted inside of me, so that I could no longer perceive the world in the same way.

Donoghue, who is Irish but lives in Canada, largely achieves this by the curious narrative voice she employs. The entire story is told through the eyes of Jack, a five-year-old boy, who is locked in a room with his mother and has never stepped outside its four walls. (There’s an interesting plan of the room on the Picador website.)

To Jack the world is the room in which he lives. And even though he watches TV, he does not realise that what he sees on screen is “real”. He has no concept of what lies beyond the locked door and the skylight above his head.

Everything he does, everything he says, everything he thinks is limited by his lack of interaction with the outside world. The language he employs has a wide vocabulary but is occasionally stilted.

When the book begins we do not know how Jack and his 27-year-old mother came to be locked in the room. We just know that they are there, that their days are filled with ingenious games and ways of passing the time, and that they enjoy each other’s company. But at night things are different: Jack hides away in a wardrobe and Ma has to “entertain” their captor, Old Nick, who “creaks the bed”. His very presence is menacing without Jack being able to explain why it is menacing.

I think this is the strength of Donoguhe’s skill as a writer. Because the entire story is told from a child’s perspective, ordinary everyday tasks take on an extraordinary dimension. And because we are reading it through the lense of adult experience, we have the ability to understand far more about what is going on than Jack does without Donoghue having to spell it out. (There are shades of John Boyne’s The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas and Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incidence of the Dog in the Night-Time in this approach, but without the sentimentality of those novels. I was also reminded more than once of Nikki Gemmell’s slightly more sinister The Book of Rapture but that’s more to do with the subject matter than the voice.)

The narrative kicks up a gear when Jack is told about the world outside the four walls in which he has lived his entire life. The news does not sit well with him. It’s too strange, too unbelievable to be true. He cannot grasp its meaning. Even when his mother begins to plot their escape, you know that Jack has not understood the consequences.

If nothing else Room is a story about a child’s journey from a completely sheltered existence to a new world full of hidden dangers. Indeed, Donoghue said she was inspired to write it a few days after the Fritzl family were discovered in their dungeon in Austria. In the press material that came with my book, Donoghue says: “If such a story of being born into captivity were told from the child’s point of view, I thought, it would not be a horror or a sob story, but a journey from one world to another.”

This is an astonishingly good novel, one that is ambitious in subject matter and perfectly executed so that you read it, partly in awe, partly in shock, but always completely immersed in the story. It’s got cracking dialogue, an irrepressible narrative voice and the kind of page-turning quality that makes you eat up 320 pages in one sitting. I am conscious of the fact that I haven’t told you much about the plot, but to do so would spoil the enjoyment of the tale which, as it unravels, envelops you in a kind of fug that is difficult to shake off. It’s tender, funny, disquieting and thought-provoking.

Will it win the Booker? Only time will tell.

Room is published in the UK on July 30. You can read an extract on the Picador website.