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Astray / Touchy Subjects
Emma Donoghue, the celebrated author of Room, brings her considerable talents to the short-story genre with these two moving collections.
Touchy Subjects
A man finds God and finally wants to father a child—only his wife is now forty-three 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 a single hair on a woman’s chin, Donoghue dramatizes the seemingly small acts upon which our lives often turn.
Astray
Gold miner. Counterfeiter. Slave. Dishwasher. Prostitute. Attorney. Sculptor. Mercenary. Elephant. Corpse. The colourful, fascinating characters that roam the pages of Emma Donoghue’s stories have all gone astray. They cross other borders, those of race, law, sex and sanity. They travel for love or money, incognito or under duress.
Touchy Subjects
A man finds God and finally wants to father a child—only his wife is now forty-three 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 a single hair on a woman’s chin, Donoghue dramatizes the seemingly small acts upon which our lives often turn.
Astray
Gold miner. Counterfeiter. Slave. Dishwasher. Prostitute. Attorney. Sculptor. Mercenary. Elephant. Corpse. The colourful, fascinating characters that roam the pages of Emma Donoghue’s stories have all gone astray. They cross other borders, those of race, law, sex and sanity. They travel for love or money, incognito or under duress.
421 pages, Kindle Edition
First published February 3, 2015
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28 people want to read
About the author
Emma Donoghue
78 books13.2k followersGrew up in Ireland, 20s in England doing a PhD in eighteenth-century literature, since then in Canada. Best known for my novel, film and play ROOM, also other contemporary and historical novels and short stories, non-fiction, theatre and middle-grade novels.
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November 19, 2025
I am loving these short stories. Each one based on a real news story. Just finished reading the one titled Last Supper at Browns. Inspired by a clipping from the Tucson Star and pasted into a scrapbook at the Museum in Prescott Arizona. It records that "Negro Brown killed his master in Texas 1864 and "throughout all his wanderings ... he was accompanied by his slain masters wife".
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