Astray--------pan macmillan
Counterfeiter. Dishwasher. Prostitute. Attorney. Sculptor. Mercenary. Elephant. Corpse.
The fascinating characters that roam across the pages of Emma Donoghue’s
latest fact-inspired fictions have all gone astray: they are emigrants,
runaways, drifters. They cross other borders, too: those of race, law,
sex and sanity. They travel for love or money, incognito or under
duress.
Donoghue describes the brutal plot hatched by a slave in conjunction
with his master’s wife to set them both free; she draws out the
difficulties of gold mining in the Yukon, even in the supposedly
plentiful early days, and she takes us to an early Puritan community in
Massachusetts unsettled by an invented sex scandal. Astray also includes
‘The Hunt’, a shocking confession of one soldier’s violent betrayal
during the American Revolution, which has been shortlisted for the
2012 Sunday Times Short Story Award.
Astray is a sequence of fourteen stories by the prize-winning author
of Room and The Sealed Letter. These strange, true tales light up four
centuries of wanderings, offering a past made up of deviations, and a
surprising and moving history for restless times.