Emma Donoghue

The author of Room presents a new collection of short stories featuring a cross-section of society including runaways, drifters, gold miners, counterfeiters, attorneys and slaves from puritan Massachusetts to revolutionary New Jersey to antebellum Louisiana. Simultaneous.

Astray

With the turn of each page, the characters that roam across these pages go astray. They are emigrants, runaways, drifters; gold miners and counterfeiters, attorneys and slaves. They cross borders of race, law, sex, and sanity. They travel for love or money, under duress or incognito. This fascinating collection from Emma Donoghue, author of the internationally bestselling Room, is a sequence of fourteen fact-inspired fictions about travels to, in and from North America, Astray offers a past in scattered pieces, a surprising and moving history for restless times.

azliana aziz

excellent compilation of short stories. counting days and daddy's girl are my two favorites. the idea of conjuring stories from tidbits of other people's lives, the 'astray-er' is compelling and emma does not fail in delivering her own version.

Laura Mauler

Short stories are my new thing solely due to the pleasure of reading this book. Highly, highly recommend.

Arden Kowalski

Not to be a dramatic jerk, but it is a true mystery how the same person who penned the genius that is Room could compile such a terrible collection of short stories. The only one I can point to as a source of actual interest is The Gift, while the uncomfortably racist, homophobic, misogynistic, and transphobic underpinnings of the other stories (combined with Donohgue's afterword) made this a truly awful reading experience. Maybe it's "historically accurate," I don't care. You can write good historical fiction - indeed good historical fiction about injustice - without falling into the same traps of bigoted thinking. I'll stick with Lisa See's work, thanks.

Astray

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