Astray

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from historical records; the author of Room, who studied 18th-century literature at Cambridge, has a gift for reading historical documents and picking out the odd, telling detail.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.

February 15, 2013

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.

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