Astray, by Emma Donoghue

First of all, I hate this cover. I appreciate the necessity of branding, and although this fits nicely against the current editions of Room and The Sealed Letter (skinny-Gothic text, wibbly out-of-focus shot of a sad looking person looking away from the camera) I think it lets the book down. It makes it look like a misery memoir, and while it might be argued that Room was a book of that type, I thought that particular novel both somewhat atypical of Donoghue's work and marketed as a more sensational book than it actually was (I do not mean this as a criticism). OK, rant over.

Cover = bad, book = good.

Astray is a collection of fourteen fact-inspired stories. Fourteen diverting sidenotes from the history books or old letters are turned into fourteen vignettes about people gone astray. It's a sweet, evocative, interesting read.

Donoghue captures the immigrant/emigrant experience with clarity and pathos. That experience is not the pull-up-your-socks, second-generation movie version, it's the version where it hurts so bad to leave your home that you carry the ache around with you like a boulder in your stomach. Many of the people in this book are very far from home, and moving ever farther.

The short stories themselves are distinct, as befits a collection gathered over more than a decade ('Counting the Days' was published in '98). Choosing these unusual historical footnotes is an interesting idea, and Donoghue uses it well. My only criticism is that her attempts to add a distinctive turn to the writing of each tale falls a little flat. The ones that deviate from non-standard telling (the first story is unfortunately one of these) feel forced, very 'creative-writing-y.' I would have preferred more boldness with her own voice, and a unifying sound to each of the stories.

Other than that, and the cover, this is recommended. It's a good choice for anyone looking to be transported  away from the tube, or the gloomy weather, to a place you've never heard of before and will never ever go.

Read by Joshua.