Hood

Hood is a bittersweet, sexy, beautifully written romance set in contemporary Ireland. In the late ?70s, convent school teenager Pen O?Grady fell in love with fellow student Cara Wall. Their unconventional relationship survived infidelities of all sorts over the years until their late 20s, when Cara died in a car accident. Pen is an appealing heroine: feisty yet vulnerable, at home in her own skin, who proves herself up to the challenge of a love not yet deemed acceptable in Catholic Ireland. Here is a love story filled with the bittersweet reflections and the emotional complexity of any intimate relationship. Above all, it is a graceful tale about coming to terms with loss.

"Utterly charming. The quality of the writing itself is paramount. It alone must carry the small domesticities, the mundane unfolding of the necessary ritual of mourning. Here again Ms. Donoghue displays her confidence by avoiding the grandiose and showy, and dipping into the ordinary with control and the occasional sustaining descriptive flashes of a born writer." The New York Times Book Review

"This is really a delicate and moving love story about people struggling to make sense of each other. There is a deftly layered intensity to the best of the writing in Hood, and Donoghue?s main characters display the contradictions of all truly memorable fictional creations. Hood is an important step forward for this exciting writer. She has extended her territory and significantly widened her scope." The Irish Times

"Wholeheartedly carnal. Nothing brings out Emma Donoghue?s gifts more confidently than the challenge of describing love-making. It takes no prisoners, this novel, for all its jovial tone. If you do not care to imagine unquenchable lust for a woman, you will not be able to bear it." Image

"Hood is thoroughly contemporary in how richly it depicts a beloved?s death to review a couple?s bumpy love history. This book?s real pleasures lie in its intimate insights, its accurate characters, and its sharp, rich observations....The greatest achievement of Hood is how it captures the domesticity of erotic passion." The Boston Globe

"Donoghue?s unsentimental examination of the relationship between the two women is a pleasure." Publishers Weekly

"Emma Donoghue is a writer of spell-binding skill, able to create a life in a sentence, a mood in a phrase, a feeling in a whisper. Hood [is] a bone-wrenching novel of loss that just may change the way you think about life and death. Donoghue creates extraordinarily rich characters who live vibrantly on every page. She uses language with an artist?s skill, creating moods and delineating character with poetic precision." Bay Area Reporter

"Her meditations on the nature of desire are exact and profoundly moving." Kirkus Reviews

"Explicit and erotic. The issues she tackles are not just gay ones. Hood is as much a book about grief as anything else." The Guardian

"Emma Donoghue negotiates this territory deftly and with rather startling humor. It is Pen?s winning sanity and avid eye for absurdity — in the Church and in the bedroom — that keeps this confident, touching novel afloat." The Independent on Sunday

EMMA DONOGHUE was born in Dublin in 1969 and earned her Ph.D. at Cambridge. A novelist, playwright, and historian whose other works of fiction include Slammerkin, Stir-Fry, and a collection of fairy tales, Kissing the Witch, she lives in Ontario, Canada.