Room

By: Emma Donoghue

Narrated by: Michal Friedman, Ellen Archer, Suzanne Toren, Robert Petkoff

Length: 10 hrs and 45 mins

Publisher's summary

A major film starring Brie Larson.
Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize.
Shortlisted for the Orange Prize.

Unsentimental and sometimes funny, devastating yet uplifting, Room by Emma Donoghue is a story of boundless maternal love. Read by a full cast of narrators.

Scared is what you're feeling. Brave is what you're doing.

Jack lives with his Ma in Room, which has a locked door and a skylight, and measures 11 feet by 11 feet. He loves watching TV, and the cartoon characters he calls friends, but he knows that nothing he sees on screen is truly real – only him, Ma and the things in Room. Until the day Ma admits that there’s a world outside . . .

Told in Jack’s voice, Room is the story of a mother and son whose love lets them survive the impossible...

Part of the Picador Collection, a series celebrating fifty years of Picador books and showcasing the best of modern literature.

©2010 Emma Donoghue (P)2010 Hachette Audio US

Critic reviews

"Emma Donoghue's writing is superb alchemy, changing innocence into horror and horror into tenderness. Room is a book to read in one sitting. When it's over you look up: the world looks the same but you are somehow different and that feeling lingers for days." (Audrey Niffenegger)

" Room is one of the most profoundly affecting books I've read in a long time. Jack moved me greatly. His voice, his story, his innocence, his love for Ma combine to create something very unusual and, I think, something very important.... Room deserves to reach the widest possible audience." (John Boyne)

"I loved Room. Such incredible imagination, and dazzling use of language. And with all this, an entirely credible, endearing little boy. It's unlike anything I've ever read before." (Anita Shreve)

"I’ve never read a more heart-burstingly, gut wrenchingly compassionate novel . . . As for sweet, bright, funny Jack, I wanted to scoop him up out of the novel and never let him go. In him, Donoghue has created 21st-century fiction's most uniquely loveable voice. She deserves to win this year's Man Booker Prize." ( Daily Mail)

"extraordinary power of Donoghue's utterly gripping story which, although not essentially just hers, has never been told in such a way before." ( Mirror Book of the Week)

"In filling this book with things that are both truly horrific and rather lovely, Emma Donoghue has achieved a work that is deeply unsettling on every level. It is a strange paradox that a book about imprisonment and torture should have become an arena for discussing the proper care and love of children. I think I am glad to have read it." ( Financial Times)

"What saves this beautifully nuanced book from being in any way a voyeuristic reaction to true crime is less the descriptions of captivity than the inevitably changing nature of the child / parent relationship, which Donoghue explores here so minutely, recognisably and exultantly." ( Sunday Telegraph)