Haven

'Everything a novel should be: compassionate, unpredictable, and questioning. Haven is Donoghue at her strange, unsettling best.' - Maggie O'Farrell, author of HamnetIn seventh-century Ireland, a priest has a dream telling him to leave the sinful world behind. Taking two monks with him – young Trian and old Cormac – he travels down the Shannon in search of an isolated spot on which to found a new place of worship. Drifting out into the Atlantic, the three men find an impossibly steep, bare island inhabited by tens of thousands of birds, and claim it for God. But in such a place, far from all other humanity, what will survival mean?‘Haven is a beautiful, bold blaze of a book’ Rachel Joyce, author of The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry‘Beautiful and timely’ - Sarah Moss, author of Summerwater‘Sinister, heart-wrenching and beautifully written’ The Times‘Combines pressure-cooker intensity and radical isolation, to stunning effect’ Margaret Atwood via Twitter‘Book of the Year’ pick in The Irish Times, The Guardian, The Irish Post, RTÉ and The Times.

A remarkably engrossing tale, This book kept me up half the night - I was unable to put it down, and read it in one spellbound gulp. It is everything a novel should be: compassionate, unpredictable, and questioning. Haven is Donoghue at her strange, unsettling best., Brooding, dreamlike . . . it’s in descriptions of the physical world that Donoghue’s prose soars . . . Likewise, among themes that include isolation and devotion, its ecological warnings are its most resonant., Quietly beautiful . . . And its subject, of course, is a universal one: we’re all stuck on this rock, trying to keep hold of simple moral truths while quietly losing our minds. As poor young Trian puts it, in one of his darkest moments: “Even this unbearable life is still sweet.", Donoghue excels in creating not just a world but a worldview that is far removed from our own . . . this is a bold, thoughtful novel.

Born in Dublin in 1969, and now living in Canada, Emma Donoghue writes fiction (novels and short stories, contemporary and historical, most recently Haven), as well as drama for screen and stage. Room was a New York Times Best Book of 2010 and a finalist for the Man Booker, Commonwealth, and Orange Prizes, selling between two and three million copies in forty languages. Donoghue was nominated for an Academy Award for her 2015 adaptation starring Brie Larson. She co-wrote the screenplay for the film of her 2016 novel The Wonder, starring Florence Pugh (Netflix, 2022). For more information, visit www.emmadonoghue.com.