Emma Donoghue Books In Order

Finbar’s Hotel Books In Publication Order

  1. Ladies’ Night at Finbar’s Hotel (1999)

Lotterys Plus One Books In Publication Order

  1. The Lotterys Plus One (2017)
  2. The Lotterys More or Less (2018)

Standalone Novels In Publication Order

  1. Stir-Fry (1994)
  2. Hood (1995)
  3. Slammerkin (2001)
  4. Life Mask (2004)
  5. Landing (2007)
  6. The Sealed Letter (2008)
  7. Room (2010)
  8. Frog Music (2014)
  9. The Wonder (2016)
  10. Akin (2019)
  11. The Pull of the Stars (2020)

Short Stories/Novellas In Publication Order

  1. Kissing the Witch (1997)
  2. The Woman Who Gave Birth to Rabbits (2002)
  3. Touchy Subjects (2006)
  4. Astray (2012)

Short Story Collections In Publication Order

  1. RED (With: Victoria Hislop) (2012)

Plays In Publication Order

  1. Ladies And Gentlemen (1996)
  2. Emma Donoghue: Selected Plays (2015)
  3. Signatories (2016)
  4. Room the Play (2017)

Non-Fiction Books In Publication Order

  1. Passions Between Women (1993)
  2. We are Michael Field (1998)
  3. Inseparable (2010)

Out Of Line Books In Publication Order

  1. This Telling (By:Cheryl Strayed) (2020)
  2. Graceful Burdens (By:Roxane Gay) (2020)
  3. Sweet Virginia (By:Caroline Kepnes) (2020)
  4. The Contractors (By:Lisa Ko) (2020)
  5. Halfway to Free (2020)
  6. Bear Witness (By:Mary Gaitskill) (2020)
  7. Shine, Pamela! Shine! (By:Kate Atkinson) (2020)

Anthologies In Publication Order

  1. The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror: Eleventh Annual Collection (1998)
  2. The Mammoth Book of Lesbian Short Stories (1999)
  3. The Penguin Book of Irish Fiction (1999)
  4. Poems Between Women (1999)
  5. Love Alters:Stories of Lesbian Love and Erotica (2013)

Finbar’s Hotel Book Covers

Lotterys Plus One Book Covers

Standalone Novels Book Covers

Short Stories/Novellas Book Covers

Short Story Collections Book Covers

Plays Book Covers

Non-Fiction Book Covers

Out Of Line Book Covers

Anthologies Book Covers

Emma Donoghue Books Overview

Ladies’ Night at Finbar’s Hotel

A year has passed since the closing of Finbar’s Hotel, a down on its heels hotel on the Dublin quays. Now, with a rock star as its new owner, it has once more opened its doors and Finbar’s has become an ultra chic gathering spot. Ladies’ Night at Finbar’s Hotel describes one night in its newly illustrious surroundings a night filled with adventure and comic romp. In one room a man surreptitiously helps his wife’s friend get pregnant, while next door a businesswoman battles her father. And down the hall, a nun struggles with the most important mission of her life. A fabulous mix of pathos and high humor, this is a sardonic tour of the gamut of human experience told by Ireland’s finest modern storytellers. Maeve Binchy has written numerous bestsellers, most recently Tara Road. Dermot Bolger is the author of six novels and edited The Vintage Book of Contemporary Irish Fiction. Clare Boylan has written six novels and several nonfiction works, including The Literary Companion to Cats. Emma Donoghue is the author of Stirfry and Kissing the Witch, among other works. Anne Haverty’s writing has been short listed for the Whitbread Award. ilis N’ Dhuibhne has published poetry, short fiction, children’s books, and two novels. Kate O’Riordan writes for stage and screen, and has written two novels including The Bray House. Deirdre Purcell recently adapted her novel Falling for a Dancer as a four part serial for BBC television.

Stir-Fry

After coming to Dublin to study at the University, sharing a flat with two eccentric women, and becoming infatuated with a man who turns out to be gay, a teenage Irish girl discovers she is a lesbian. National Tour.

Hood

SUNDAYMayday in 1980? heat sealing my fingers together. Why is it the most ordinary images that fall out, when I shuffle the memories? Two girls in a secondhand bookshop, hands sticky with sampled perfumes from an afternoon’s Dublin. Up these four storeys of shelves, time moves more slowly than outside on the quays of the dirty river. One window cuts a slab of sunlight; dust motes twitch through it. I shut my eyes and breathe in. ‘Which did I put on my thumb, Cara, do you remember?’No answer. I stretch my hand towards her over the Irish poetry shelf, as if hitching a lift. ‘All I can smell is old books; you have a go. Was it sandalwood?’Cam emerges from a cartoon, and dips to my hand She wrinkles her nose, which has always reminded me of an ‘is less than’ sign in algebra.’Not nice?’ I ask.’Dunno, Pen. Something liquorishy.’ Her eyes drift back to the page.’1 hate liquorice.’ All I can make out now is vile strawberry on the wrist. I offer my thumb for Cara to smell again, but she has edged down a shelf to Theology. My arm moves in her wake and topples a pyramid of Surprising Summer Salads.I’m sure to have torn one. I have only ninety two pence in my drawstring purse, and my belly is cramping. It occurs to me to simply shift my weight on to the ball of my foot and take off like a crazed rhinoceros through the door, Then, being a responsible citizen, even at seventeen, I put my mother’s spare handbag down beside the sprawl of books, and kneel. The princess who sorted seeds from sand at least had eloquent ants to help her. All I get are Cara’s eyes rolling from the safe distance of the Marxism shelf, and a snig*ger from some art student over by the window. Luckily the black lipsticked Goth at the till is engrossed in finding a paper bag for an old atlas; in any other bookshop a saleswoman would be pursing her lips and planting her stiletto heels six inches from my fingers. The tomb of Surprising Summer Salads I build is better ventilated than the original, almost Japanese. I have been neat, no one can make me buy a copy. If it were Astonishing Autumn Appetizers, now, I might consider itI’m blithering, amn’t I?Cara is over by Aviation pretending not to know me, so I set off downstairs; tr

Slammerkin

Born to rough cloth in working class London in 1748, Mary Saunders hungers for linen and lace. Her lust for a shiny red ribbon leads her to a life of prostitution at a young age, where she encounters a freedom unknown to virtuous young women. But a dangerous misstep sends her fleeing to Monmouth and the refuge of the middle class household of Mrs. Jones, to become the seamstress her mother always expected her to be and to live the ordinary life of an ordinary girl. Although Mary becomes a close confidante of Mrs. Jones, her desire for a better life leads her back to prostitution. She remains true only to the three rules she learned on the streets of London: Never give up your liberty; Clothes make the woman; Clothes are the greatest lie ever told. In the end, it is clothes, their splendor and their deception, that lead Mary to disaster. Emma Donoghue’s daring, sensually charged prose casts a new sheen on the squalor and glamour of eighteenth century England. Accurate, masterfully written, and infused with themes that still bedevil us today,Slammerkinis historical fiction for all readers.

Life Mask

The bestselling author of Slammerkin turns her attention to the Beau Monde of late eighteenth century England, turning the private drama of three celebrated Londoners into a robust, full bodied portrait of a world, and lives, on the brink of revolution. The Honourable Mrs. Damer is a young widow of eccentric tastes, the only female sculptor of her time. The Earl of Derby, inventor of the horse race that bears his name, is the richest man in the House of Lords and the ugliest. Miss Eliza Farren, born a nobody, now reigns as Queen of Comedy at Drury Lane Theatre. In a time of looming war and terrorism, of glittering spectacle and financial disasters, the wealthy liberals of the Whig Party work to topple a tyrannical prime minister and a lunatic king. Their marriages and friendships stretch or break; political liaisons prove as dangerous as erotic ones. Will Eliza Farren ever gain entry to that elite circle that calls itself the World? Can Lord Derby’s pride endure public mockery of his long, unconsummated courtship of the actress? And how is Anne Damer ever to silence the whispers of Sapphism that haunt her? Let the games begin…

Landing

A delightful, old fashioned love story with a uniquely twenty first century twist, Landing is a romantic comedy that explores the pleasures and sorrows of long distance relationships the kind millions of us now maintain mostly by plane, phone, and Internet.

S le is a stylish citizen of the new Dublin, a veteran flight attendant who’s traveled the world. Jude is a twenty five year old archivist, stubbornly attached to the tiny town of Ireland, Ontario, in which she was born and raised. On her first plane trip, Jude s and S le s worlds touch and snag at Heathrow Airport. In the course of the next year, their lives, and those of their friends and families, will be drawn into a new, shaky orbit.

This sparkling, lively story explores age old questions: Does where you live matter more than who you live with? What would you give up for love, and would you be a fool to do so?

20070424

The Sealed Letter

Miss Emily ‘Fido’ Faithfull is a ‘woman of business’ and a spinster pioneer in the British women’s movement, independent of mind but naively trusting of heart. Distracted from her cause by the sudden return of a once dear friend, the unhappily wed Helen Codrington, Fido is swept up in the intimate details of Helen s failing marriage and obsessive affair with a young army officer. What begins as a loyal effort to help a friend explodes into an intriguing courtroom drama complete with accusations of adultery, counterclaims of rape, and a mysterious letter that could destroy more than one life.

Based on a scandalous divorce case that gripped England in 1864, The Sealed Letter is a riveting, provocative drama of friends, lovers, and divorce, Victorian style.

Room

This is the story of a mother, her son, a locked room and the outside world. Jack is five and, like any little boy, excited at the prospect of presents and cake. He’s looking forward to telling his friends it’s his birthday, too. But although Jack is a normal child in many ways loving, funny, bright, full of energy and questions his upbringing is far from ordinary: Jack’s entire life has been spent in a single room that measures just 12 feet by 12 feet; as far as he’s concerned, Room is the entire world. He shares this world with his mother, with Plant, and tiny Mouse though Ma isn’t a fan and throws a book at Mouse when she sees him. There’s TV too, of course and the cartoon characters he thinks of as his friends but Jack knows that nothing else he sees on the screen is real. Old Nick, on the other hand, is all too real, but only visits at night like a bat when Jack is meant to be asleep and hidden safely in Wardrobe. And only Old Nick has the code to Door, which is otherwise locked…
Told in Jack’s voice, ‘Room’ is the story of a mother’s love for her son, and of a young boy’s innocence. Unsentimental yet affecting, devastating yet uplifting, it promises to be the most talked about novel of 2010.

Kissing the Witch

Thirteen tales are unspun from the deeply familiar, and woven anew into a collection of fairy tales that wind back through time. Acclaimed Irish author Emma Donoghue reveals hero*ines young and old in unexpected alliances sometimes treacherous, sometimes erotic, but always courageous. Told with luminous voices that shimmer with sensuality and truth, these age old characters shed their antiquated cloaks to travel a seductive new landscape, radiantly transformed. Cinderella forsakes the handsome prince and runs off with the fairy godmother; Beauty discovers the Beast behind the mask is not so very different from the face she sees in the mirror; Snow White is awakened from slumber by the bittersweet fruit of an unnamed desire. Acclaimed writer Emma Donoghue spins new tales out of old in a magical web of thirteen interconnected stories about power and transformation and choosing one’s own path in the world. In these fairy tales, women young and old tell their own stories of love and hate, honor and revenge, passion and deception. Using the intricate patterns and oral rhythms of traditional fairy tales, Emma Donoghue wraps age old characters in a dazzling new skin. 2000 List of Popular Paperbacks for YA

The Woman Who Gave Birth to Rabbits

Donoghue finds her inspiration for these wry, robust tales in obscure scraps of historical records: an engraving of a woman giving birth to rabbits; a plague ballad; surgical case notes; theological pamphlets; an articulated skeleton. Here kings, surgeons, soldiers, and ladies of leisure rub shoulders with cross dressers, cult leaders, poisoners, and arsonists. Whether she’s spinning the tale of an Irish soldier tricked into marrying a dowdy spinster, a Victorian surgeon’s attempts to ‘improve’ women, a seventeenth century countess who ran away to Italy disguised as a man, or an ‘undead’ murderess returning for the maid she left behind to be executed in her place, Emma Donoghue brings to her stories an ‘elegant, colorful prose filled with unforgettable sights, sounds and smells’ Elle. Here she summons the ghosts of those women who counted for nothing in their own day, but who come to unforgettable life in fiction.

Touchy Subjects

In this sparkling collection of nineteen stories, the bestselling author of Slammerkin returns to contemporary affairs, exposing the private dilemmas that result from some of our most public controversies. A man finds God and finally wants to father a child only his wife is now forty two years old. A coach’s son discovers his sexuality on the football field. A roommate’s bizarre secret liberates a repressed young woman. From the unforeseen consequences of a polite social lie to the turmoil caused by the hair on a woman’s chin, Donoghue dramatizes the seemingly small acts upon which our lives often turn. Many of these stories involve animals and what they mean to us, or babies and whether to have them; some replay biblical plots in modern contexts. With characters old, young, straight, gay, and simply confused, Donoghue dazzles with her range and her ability to touch lightly but delve deeply into the human condition. 20060917

RED (With: Victoria Hislop)

A gorgeous new Cecelia mini book which contains two powerful and unforgettable short stories. Girl in the Mirror Lila knows how lucky she is to have found the man of her dreams. But when a secret from her family’s past comes to light on her wedding day, her destiny changes in the most unexpected of ways! The Memory Maker They say you never forget your first love. But what happens when those cherished memories start to fade? Some people would do anything to hold on to the past and, for one heartbroken man, that means finding a way to relive those precious moments!

Room the Play

This is the story of a mother, her son, a locked room and the outside world. Jack is five and, like any little boy, excited at the prospect of presents and cake. He’s looking forward to telling his friends it’s his birthday, too. But although Jack is a normal child in many ways loving, funny, bright, full of energy and questions his upbringing is far from ordinary: Jack’s entire life has been spent in a single room that measures just 12 feet by 12 feet; as far as he’s concerned, Room is the entire world. He shares this world with his mother, with Plant, and tiny Mouse though Ma isn’t a fan and throws a book at Mouse when she sees him. There’s TV too, of course and the cartoon characters he thinks of as his friends but Jack knows that nothing else he sees on the screen is real. Old Nick, on the other hand, is all too real, but only visits at night like a bat when Jack is meant to be asleep and hidden safely in Wardrobe. And only Old Nick has the code to Door, which is otherwise locked…
Told in Jack’s voice, ‘Room’ is the story of a mother’s love for her son, and of a young boy’s innocence. Unsentimental yet affecting, devastating yet uplifting, it promises to be the most talked about novel of 2010.

Passions Between Women

A frank examination of eighteenth century lesbian culture reveals a widespread range of previously overlooked lesbian identities in Britain and covers such topics as group sex, sadomasochism, and hermaphrodites. Tour.

We are Michael Field

Biography of the aunt and niece who wrote together under the pseudonym of Michael Field.

Inseparable

From a writer of astonishing versatility and erudition, the much admired literary critic, novelist, short story writer, and scholar Dazzling The Washington Post; One of those rare writers who seems to be able to work on any register, any time, any atmosphere, and make it her own The Observer, a book that explores the little known literary tradition of love between women in Western literature, from Chaucer and Shakespeare to Charlotte Bront , Dickens, Agatha Christie, and many more. Emma Donoghue brings to bear all her knowledge and grasp to examine how desire between women in English literature has been portrayed, from schoolgirls and vampires to runaway wives, from cross dressing knights to contemporary murder stories. Donoghue looks at the work of those writers who have addressed the unspeakable subject, examining whether such desire between women is freakish or omnipresent, holy or evil, heartwarming or ridiculous as she excavates a long obscured tradition of Inseparable friendship between women, one that is surprisingly central to our cultural history. Donoghue writes about the half dozen contrasting girl girl plots that have been told and retold over the centuries, metamorphosing from generation to generation. What interests the author are the twists and turns of the plots themselves and how these stories have changed or haven t over the centuries, rather than how they reflect their time and society. Donoghue explores the writing of Sade, Diderot, Balzac, Thomas Hardy, H. Rider Haggard, Elizabeth Bowen, and others and the ways in which the woman who desires women has been cast as not quite human, as ghost or vampire. She writes about the ever present triangle, found in novels and plays from the last three centuries, in which a woman and man compete for the hero*ine’s love…
about how and why same sex attraction is surprisingly ubiquitous in crime fiction, from the work of Wilkie Collins and Dorothy L. Sayers to P. D. James. Finally, Donoghue looks at the plotline that has dominated writings about desire between women since the late nineteenth century: how a woman s life is turned upside down by the realization that she desires another woman, whether she comes to terms with this discovery privately, comes out of the closet, or is publicly outed. She shows how this narrative pattern has remained popular and how it has taken many forms, in the works of George Moore, Radclyffe Hall, Patricia Highsmith, and Rita Mae Brown, from case history style stories and dramas, in and out of the courtroom, to schoolgirl love stories and rebellious picaresques. A revelation of a centuries old literary tradition brilliant, amusing, and until now, deliberately overlooked.

The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror: Eleventh Annual Collection

Culled from the best of a wide variety of sources, this eleventh annual collection of fantasy fiction features contributions by Kim Newman, Joyce Carol Oates, Ellen Kushner, Jack Womack, Karen Joy Fowler, and others.

The Penguin Book of Irish Fiction

This unique anthology illustrates the full range of Irish fiction from Gulliver’s Travels to young contemporary writers like Roddy Doyle and Emma Donoghue. Including self contained sections from novels as well as short stories, all the most important writers are represented, from Swift and Sterne through Joyce, Beckett and Wilde to modern masters like Banville and William Trevor. Colm Toibin’s long introduction describes the contexts and particular strengths of Irish fiction.

Poems Between Women

1998 Lambda Literary Awards, spirituality/religion category With poems in English by over one hundred female poets American, English, Scottish, Canadian, South African, Indian, Irish, and Australian this is an extraordinary collection that pays homage to four centuries of women’s desires, friendships, and expressions of love. The collection is testimony to the rich tradition of female verse and the timelessness of love and creativity.

Related Authors

Leave a Comment