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Summary
Summary
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 goldminers 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.
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
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from historical records; the author of Room, who studied 18th-century literature at Cambridge, has a gift for reading historical documents and picking out the odd, telling detail.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. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Guardian Review
Emma Donoghue is a historian as well as a novelist. With Astray, a collection of short stories about emigrants, drifters, taboo-breakers and border-crossers on their way to, or scrabbling to survive in, the New World, she takes us back to the historical archive. Each story is followed by details of the life on which it is based and the histories, legal records or letters where Donoghue found her seed of inspiration. Some, such as "The Gift", in which a reluctant mother gives up her child for adoption, or "Counting the Days", about an Irish emigrant couple waiting to be reunited, have phrases from real-life letters nestled inside them. Written over a period of 15 years and covering four centuries, the stories are held together by their unity of theme, but their brevity can be frustrating. What unites Donoghue's protagonists and lifts them out of the historical archive is their openness to imaginative possibility, the sense of a life elsewhere, and in these moments, Donoghue brings history into sharp and shocking focus. - Justine Jordan Emma Donoghue is a historian as well as a novelist. With Astray, a collection of short stories about emigrants, drifters, taboo-breakers and border-crossers on their way to, or scrabbling to survive in, the New World, she takes us back to the historical archive. - Justine Jordan.
Kirkus Review
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 Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* 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 War-era Texas, the gold rush Yukon, and many other settings come to life in this wonderfully imaginative, transporting collection.--Huntley, Kristine Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
EMMA DONOGHUE, born in Ireland in 1969, is twice an emigrant, having moved first to England and then to Canada to raise a family. Sometimes, she writes, when the plane begins its descent above London, Ontario, her adopted city, "I find myself troubled by confusion, which gives way to a sense of arbitrariness. Why am I landing here, out of all possible spots on the turning globe? . . . If your ethical compass is formed by the place you grow up, which way will its needle swing when you're far from home?" Donoghue's new story collection, "Astray," explores the theme of emigration through the use of historical documents and persona] letters Donoghue has unearthed over the last decade and more. The type of historical fiction in which an author takes actual people (conveniently dead!) and puts thoughts into their heads and words into their mouths can seem presumptuous, especially when the author is less intelligent and interesting than the person whose thoughts he is trying to imagine. This is not the case with Donoghue: her work (as she proved most recently in her hugely successful novel, "Room") is sensitive and intuitive, and her narrative voice moves fearlessly between centuries and between genders. The characters Donoghue has chosen as subjects in "Astray" are traveling "to, within, and occasionally from the United States and Canada," and with few exceptions were "real people who left traces in the historical record." Most are obscure; a few are better known to history and have even left biographical material behind, as did the narrator of her first tale: Matthew Scott, ostensible author of the ghostwritten "Autobiography of Matthew Scott, Jumbo's Keeper" (1885). Donoghue sets this story, "Man and Boy," at the dramatic moment when the London Zoological Society had just sold its most popular attraction, Jumbo "the Beloved Pachydermic Behemoth," to P.T. Barnum; Scott (the only man who could handle the beast) was given the task of luring him into his crate for the trans-Atlantic crossing. Scott's loving monologue to Jumbo is a perfect example of Donoghue's facility with dialogue and character traits; Matthew's distinctive turn of phrase - "We don't mind the piddling tiddlers of this world, do we, boy? We just avert our gaze" - combines absurdity and nobility with a sure touch. Just as true, yet entirely different, is the language of an abused slave planning his getaway from a remote Texas farm in 1864 in "Last Supper at Brown's"; this brief, suspenseful story was inspired by a cupping from The Tucson Star telling of a slave who killed his master and "throughout all his wanderings . . . he was accompanied by his slain master's wife." The act of emigration causes radical disturbance, and nowhere does Donoghue get this fact across better than in "Counting the Days," a tale inspired by 13 letters between one Henry Johnson, who left Belfast for Quebec in 1848, and his wife, Jane, who sailed with their children to join him a year later. The author has set the story at the moment when Jane is pulling into harbor just as Henry is succumbing to cholera in a Montreal hospital. Some of the couple's letters are quoted verbatim, and while the Johnsons were neither very articulate nor even terribly literate, Donoghue's juxtaposition of their awkward expressions of love with the more sophisticated interior monologues she has provided for them makes a potent contrast. Donoghue displays a ventriloquist's uncanny ability to slip in and out of voices. She is in turn Richard Berry, an odd settler in Yarmouth who in 1649 began accusing his neighbors of sex crimes; Aimée Locoul, a 15-year-old Creole girl on a Louisiana plantation; and Sarah Bell, a 19th-century woman who, having fallen on hard times, was compelled to send her daughter to the New York Children's Aid Society and eventually lost her forever. Most hauntingly, perhaps, she is 22-year-old Minnie Hall, trying to come to terms with the discovery that her recently deceased father, a well-known politician, turns out to have been a woman. As the author points out in her afterword, many of these characters stray not only across geographical boundaries but across those of law, sex or race. Donoghue reveals them all, in their places of exile, with gentle yet devastating truth.
Library Journal Review
Elephant trainers, counterfeiters, prostitutes, and slaves are among the intriguing historical characters who wander the pages of Irish author Donoghue's short stories. Each of the restless characters goes astray in search of love, money, security, or a better life. In a fascinating afterword, Donoghue reveals that the idea for the collection came from her own experiences as an emigrant (she moved from Dublin to England and then to Canada). Each tale is based on an event or person whose story the author unearthed from an old newspaper or archive and is followed by information on some of the research involved. Many of these richly detailed shorts are told in the first person, and the fabulous cadre of narrators (James Langton, Khristine Hvam, Robert Petkoff, Suzanne Toren, and Dion Graham) bring these little gems vividly to life. VERDICT For all fans of literary or historical fiction. ["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," read the review of the Little, Brown hc, LJ 6/15/12.-Ed.]-Beth Farrell, Cleveland State Univ. Law Lib. (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
