Each story in Emma Donoghue’s new collection has roots in fact: the trouble caused by a paranoid settler in 17th-century Cape Cod; the gruelling Yukon winter of 1896, which broke the spirits of so many prospectors; the enduring love between two women artists in a 1960s Ontario care-home. Readers first meet a London zookeeper in 1882, distraught over the transfer of his favourite elephant to America. We later read the love-letters of a young mother, sailing from Ireland to Canada to meet her husband, who will be dead of cholera before she arrives. In 1860s Texas, a slave plans a reckless break for freedom and takes his master’s wife with him. In New Jersey City, a decade later, a destitute girl gives up her baby for adoption, as we are told a quarter of a million hungry American families had to do.
Every tale elaborates a physical or emotional departure from an unliveable life. Donoghue ingeniously ends each story not with a pivotal incident from her vivid fiction, but rather with an authorial postscript detailing the facts of the matter. An informative and witty Afterword further details Donoghue's research and bears reading even before beginning the collection.
Ultimately, "Astray" does present hope. It shows the talent of a writer for whom every life has its shining moments despite the dark truths told alongside them.
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