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Astray
(Adobe EPUB eBook, Kindle Book, OverDrive Read)

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Published:
Little, Brown and Company 2012
Format:
Adobe EPUB eBook, Kindle Book, OverDrive Read
Status:
Available from OverDrive
Description
From the New York Times bestselling author of Room comes a moving set of historical stories spanning centuries and continents.

The fascinating characters that roam across the pages of Emma Donoghue's stories have all gone astray: they are emigrants, runaways, drifters, lovers old and new. They are gold miners and counterfeiters, attorneys and slaves. They cross other borders too: those of race, law, sex, and sanity. They travel for love or money, incognito or under duress.
With rich historical detail, the celebrated author of Room takes us from puritan Massachusetts to revolutionary New Jersey, antebellum Louisiana to the Toronto highway, lighting up four centuries of wanderings that have profound echoes in the present. Astray offers us a surprising and moving history for restless times.
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Street Date:
10/30/2012
Language:
English
ISBN:
9780316206266, 9780316215947
ASIN:
B007BGNSJQ
Citations
APA Citation (style guide)

Emma Donoghue. (2012). Astray. Little, Brown and Company.

Chicago / Turabian - Author Date Citation (style guide)

Emma Donoghue. 2012. Astray. Little, Brown and Company.

Chicago / Turabian - Humanities Citation (style guide)

Emma Donoghue, Astray. Little, Brown and Company, 2012.

MLA Citation (style guide)

Emma Donoghue. Astray. Little, Brown and Company, 2012.

Note! Citation formats are based on standards as of July 2022. Citations contain only title, author, edition, publisher, and year published. Citations should be used as a guideline and should be double checked for accuracy.
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Anne Arundel County Public Library11
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Grouped Work ID:
0dec5bd8-2834-5ad8-7654-08acfd038100
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Needs Update?:
No
Date Added:
Jun 03, 2017 06:37:23
Date Updated:
Nov 16, 2017 00:06:41
Last Metadata Check:
Mar 24, 2024 05:37:53
Last Metadata Change:
Mar 24, 2024 05:37:53
Last Availability Check:
Mar 24, 2024 05:37:58
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Sep 07, 2023 23:07:58
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      • fileAs: Donoghue, Emma
      • bioText: Born in Dublin in 1969, Emma Donoghue is an Irish emigrant twice over: she spent eight years in Cambridge doing a PhD in eighteenth-century literature before moving to London, Ontario, where she lives with her partner and their two children. She also migrates between genres, writing literary history, biography, stage and radio plays as well as fairy tales and short stories.
        She is best known for her novels, which range from the historical (Frog Music, Slammerkin, Life Mask, Landing, The Sealed Letter) to the contemporary (Akin, Stir-Fry, Hood, Landing). Her international bestseller Room was a New York Times Best Book of 2010 and was a finalist for the Man Booker, Commonwealth, and Orange Prizes.
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From the New York Times bestselling author of Room comes a moving set of historical stories spanning centuries and continents.

The fascinating characters that roam across the pages of Emma Donoghue's stories have all gone astray: they are emigrants, runaways, drifters, lovers old and new. They are gold miners and counterfeiters, attorneys and slaves. They cross other borders too: those of race, law, sex, and sanity. They travel for love or money, incognito or under duress.
With rich historical detail, the celebrated author of Room takes us from puritan Massachusetts to revolutionary New Jersey, antebellum Louisiana to the Toronto highway, lighting up four centuries of wanderings that have profound echoes in the present. Astray offers us a surprising and moving history for restless times.
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title
Astray
fullDescription
From the New York Times bestselling author of Room comes a moving set of historical stories spanning centuries and continents.

The fascinating characters that roam across the pages of Emma Donoghue's stories have all gone astray: they are emigrants, runaways, drifters, lovers old and new. They are gold miners and counterfeiters, attorneys and slaves. They cross other borders too: those of race, law, sex, and sanity. They travel for love or money, incognito or under duress.
With rich historical detail, the celebrated author of Room takes us from puritan Massachusetts to revolutionary New Jersey, antebellum Louisiana to the Toronto highway, lighting up four centuries of wanderings that have profound echoes in the present. Astray offers us a surprising and moving history for restless times.
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reviews
      • premium: False
      • source: -Ann Patchett, author of State of Wonder
      • content: Time and again, Emma Donoghue writes books that are unlike anything I have ever seen before, and ASTRAY is no exception. There is such a deep and compassionate imagination at work in every story in this collection that ASTRAY feels almost like an act of clairvoyance.
      • premium: False
      • source: Colum McCann, author of Let the Great World Spin
      • content: Emma Donoghue is one of the great literary ventriloquists of our time. Her imagination is kaleidoscopic. She steps borders and boundaries with great ease and style. In her hands the centuries dissolve, and then they crystallize back again into powerful words on the page.
      • premium: False
      • source: Kirkus Reviews
      • content: This book demonstrates once again that there's little she can't do well; indeed, the afterword is as moving as the stories....The short story can be a precious, self-enclosed form, but in Donoghue's bold hands, it crosses continents and centuries to claim kinship with many kinds of people.... Another exciting change of pace from the protean Donoghue.
      • premium: False
      • source: Kristine Huntley, Booklist (Starred Review)
      • content: ...Masterful.... Revolutionary-era New Jersey, Civil War-era Texas, the gold rush Yukon, and many other settings come to life in this wonderfully imaginative, transporting collection.
      • premium: False
      • source: Emily Temple, Flavorpill
      • content: Donoghue applies her talents for characterization and depth of feeling over and over again as she documents restless wanderers and lost souls across four generations, each in a world as strange and real as the last.
      • premium: False
      • source: Publishers Weekly
      • content: Donoghue establishes a distinct voice and person [and] the stories are vivid, curious, and honest...
      • premium: False
      • source: Stephan Lee, Entertainment Weekly
      • content: [The] tales...feel like discoveries, stories that were waiting to be told.
      • premium: False
      • source: Mike Fischer, The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
      • content: This collection is filled with such acts of imaginative sympathy-each chiseling all that one can, from what Donoghue aptly describes as 'the shadowy mass of all that's been lost.'
      • premium: False
      • source: Margaret Quamme, The Columbus Dispatch
      • content: The stories are taut, vivid and memorable, and the collection reveals Donoghue's remarkable gift for placing herself in the minds of people who otherwise might be lost to history.
      • premium: False
      • source: Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal
      • content: The stories are showcases for a wide range of speaking voices studded with period vernacular.
      • premium: False
      • source: Holloway McCandless, Shelf Awareness
      • content: Fans of... Room will recognize the same imaginative flexibility and ventriloquism in ASTRAY, only multiplied and lightly patinated.... A refreshing break from the trend of linked collections; each story is entirely discrete, and strong enough to be read in isolation.
      • premium: False
      • source: People (4 stars)
      • content: Haunting.... These seekers and their stories pull you in-and stir your heart.
      • premium: False
      • source: [An] original and compelling collection.
      • content: Splendid....
      • premium: False
      • source: Caroline Leavitt, The San Francisco Chronicle
      • content: From England, Canada and the United States, Donoghue has created a restless world of travelers, finders and seekers, as well as a book that is an interactive narrative hybrid, one that gets us lost in other lives, that probes our history, that reveals the artist behind the word and that ultimately shows us something fresh, unsettling and enduring about ourselves.
      • premium: False
      • source: Brooke Allen, The New York Times Book Review
      • content: Sensitive and intuitive...moves fearlessly between centuries and between genders.... Donoghue displays a ventriloquist's uncanny ability to slip in and out of voices....[and she] reveals them all, in their place of exile, with gentle yet devastating truth.
      • premium: False
      • source: Patricia Hagen, Minneapolis Star Tribune
      • content: Donoghue is...something of a literary archaeologist, speaking in voices that have been lost.... Donoghue's empathic imagination is remarkable...so convincing[] that the reader feels these stories could be actual historical narratives.
      • premium: False
      • source: Sandy Leonard, Lambda Literary
      • content: A rich roster of tales [and] a real adventure in reading.... Donoghue's gift for storytelling is remarkable....
      • premium: False
      • source: Rob Merrill, Associated Press
      • content: Donoghue is gifted at imagining narrators from all walks of life.... Anyone who appreciates a well-told tale will enjoy these 14 short stories. It's perfect for the bedside table or the quiet commute-rich tales by a writer near the top of her game.
      • premium: False
      • source: The New York Times Book Review (Editors' Choice)
      • content: Gentle yet devastating...
      • premium: False
      • source: Heller McAlpin, The Washington Post
      • content: Donoghue's ASTRAY masters the long reach of short tales.... What is most impressive about these stories is her ability to plumb historical footnotes for timeless emotional resonance and
      • premium: True
      • source: Publisher's Weekly
      • content:

        June 11, 2012
        The stories in Donoghue���s new collection all come, to varying degrees, from historical records; the author of Room, who studied 18th-century literature at Cambridge, has a gift for reading historical documents and picking out the odd, telling detail. There���s the Plymouth Plantation man who accuses his neighbors of indecency, in ���The Lost Seed���; the woman who gives her daughter up for adoption, then writes the Children���s Aid Society demanding her return, in ���The Gift���; the Tammany Hall bigwig found to be a woman, in ���Daddy���s Girl���; all outlines begging to be filled in. The 14 stories are all short (many too short), and by the time they���ve set up the circumstances and the era, they���re almost done, and we���re leaving characters we know as creatures of a time and place rather than individuals. When Donoghue establishes a distinct voice and person, the stories are vivid, curious, and honest: we���ll remember the serial Puritan accuser and the young German soldier in revolutionary America long after we���ve forgotten other characters���like Jumbo the Victorian elephant and his keeper or the men who tried to hold Abraham Lincoln���s body for ransom���in stories that are notable more for the historical moments they reconstruct than for the people who inhabit them. Agent: Kathleen Anderson.

      • premium: True
      • source: Kirkus
      • content:

        September 15, 2012
        Fourteen tales of people cut loose from their roots--voluntarily or not. It's characteristic of the restless Donoghue to follow up a terrifying contemporary thriller and international best-seller (Room, 2010, etc.) with a collection of historical fiction. Past and present have held equal sway over her imagination in previous work, and three story collections have showcased her abundant gifts as aptly as her seven novels. This book demonstrates once again that there's little she can't do well; indeed, the afterword is as moving as the stories. Donoghue offers her own biography--Irish-born, Cambridge-educated, longtime resident in Canada--to explain her fascination with other wanderers trying to invent new lives for themselves. She can empathize with a Victorian Londoner forced into prostitution ("Onward") as well as with a buccaneering cheat who fraudulently obtains her husband's fortune and skips out of 18th-century New York ("The Widow's Cruse"). The gruff friendship-with-benefits of two gold prospectors in the Yukon ("Snowblind") is portrayed as tenderly as the marriage of two refugees from the Irish potato famine, thwarted of their reunion in Canada ("Counting the Days"). The collection's most wrenching tale, "The Gift," achieves the remarkable feat of bringing alive both the agony of a woman driven by poverty to give up her baby and the quiet dignity of the girl's adoptive father--in an exchange of letters, no less. Donoghue views her characters with determined generosity, even when their behavior is reprehensible: The first-person narratives of a vengeful Puritan settler in Cape Cod ("The Lost Seed") and a thoughtless white girl on a Louisiana plantation ("Vanitas") trace complicated motives and a desperation for love of which the protagonists may not even be aware. The short story can be a precious, self-enclosed form, but in Donoghue's bold hands, it crosses continents and centuries to claim kinship with many kinds of people. Another exciting change of pace from the protean Donoghue.

        COPYRIGHT(2012) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

      • premium: True
      • source: Library Journal
      • content:

        May 15, 2012

        Emigrants and runaways, lovers and slaves. The characters in Donoghue's new story collection have all wandered far from home, and they've pushed psychological boundaries as well. The author of the Man Booker finalist Room, which has sold over a million copies, offers eye-popping stories with intriguing historical endnotes. Can't wait to read.

        Copyright 2012 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

      • premium: True
      • source: Booklist
      • content:

        Starred review from September 15, 2012
        Inspired by various newspaper articles and stories from the last four centuries, Booker Prize finalist Donoghue's (Room, 2010) masterful new short story collection explores the ways people's lives can take unexpected and unprepared-for turns. A fallen woman in Victorian England supports herself and her child by the only means available to her until her younger brother comes up with another option. As the Civil War rages on, a slave and his mistress plot a daring escape. A bitter Puritan seeks revenge upon two women who spurned him. A woman sails toward Canada to join her husband, not knowing he's fallen gravely ill with cholera. A lawyer sets his sights on a wealthy young widow who seeks his help. A young woman makes a startling discovery about her politically powerful father after his death in New York City at the dawn of the twentieth century. Donoghue details the particular historical source that inspired her at the end of each story, and she discusses how each one fits in with her overall theme in the afterword. Revolutionary-era New Jersey, Civil Warera Texas, the gold rush Yukon, and many other settings come to life in this wonderfully imaginative, transporting collection.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)

      • premium: True
      • source: Library Journal
      • content:

        June 15, 2012

        A woman in 1901 New York who discovers that her reputed father was actually a female in disguise. Two aging sculptors in 1968 Ontario, women before their time, reliving their glory days. A brother in 1854 London convincing the sister who's sold her body to support him to sell her story instead so that they can emigrate. A horrific instance of rape during the American Revolution. A mistress in 1864 Texas conniving to run away with her slave. These are among the stories in the new collection from Man Booker finalist Donoghue (Room), each inspired by a news account or letter and each a little gem. Donoghue's characters face struggle or loss with determined grace; their situations are inherently dramatic, but the writing is smartly underplayed, refusing to hit hysterical high notes. What's equally intriguing is that each story concludes with the account that inspired it, which lets readers see the leap from fact to fiction. VERDICT Working in a different vein from the wrenching Room, Donoghue has created masterly pieces that show what short fiction can do. Not just for devotees of the form. [See Prepub Alert, 4/12/12.]--Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal

        Copyright 2012 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

popularity
111
publisher
Little, Brown and Company
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      • description: Fiction / Literary
      • code: FIC029000
      • description: Fiction / Short Stories (single author)