Room
SynopsisPlot
Held captive for years in a small shed, a woman and her precocious young son finally gain their freedom, and the boy experiences the outside world for the first time. To five-year-old-Jack, Room is the world. It's where he was born, it's where he and his Ma eat and sleep and play and learn. At night, his Ma shuts him safely in the wardrobe, where he is meant to be asleep when Old Nick visits. Room is home to Jack, but to Ma it's the prison where she has been held for seven years. Through her fierce love for her son, she has created a life for him in this eleven-by-eleven-foot space. But with Jack's curiosity building alongside her own desperation, she knows that Room cannot contain either much longer.
Story
About this book
Room, published in 2010 by Irish-Canadian author Emma Donoghue, is narrated by five-year-old Jack. To Jack, the eleven-by-eleven-foot shed where he lives with his mother is the whole world. He was born there, and all he knows fits inside its walls. His Ma fills their days with routines, games, and lessons, and at night she shuts him in a wardrobe before a man he calls Old Nick arrives. Jack does not grasp what his mother knows: she has been held there for seven years.
Donoghue has said the story was prompted by the Fritzl case in Austria, where children were confined for years in a hidden basement. The novel uses Jack's limited viewpoint to show how a child can accept extraordinary conditions as normal while an adult in the same space understands them very differently. As Jack's curiosity about what lies beyond Room grows, his mother weighs a narrow chance at freedom.
The book was shortlisted for the 2010 Booker Prize and received several other recognitions, including the 2011 Commonwealth Writers' Prize regional award for the Caribbean and Canada. It was also shortlisted for the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize and the Governor General's Awards.
