Synopses & Reviews
SUNDAY
Mayday 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 snigger 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 it
I'm blithering, amn't I?
Cara is over by Aviation pretending not to know me, so I set off downstairs; tr
Review
"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
Review
"Hood is thoroughly contemporary in how richly it depicts a beloveds death to review a couples bumpy love history. This books 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
Review
"Donoghues unsentimental examination of the relationship between the two women is a pleasure." Publishers Weekly
Review
"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 artists skill, creating moods and delineating character with poetic precision." Bay Area Reporter
Review
"Her meditations on the nature of desire are exact and profoundly moving." Kirkus Reviews
Review
"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
Review
"Emma Donoghue negotiates this territory deftly and with rather startling humor. It is Pens 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
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 Donoghues 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
Review
"Wholeheartedly carnal. Nothing brings out Emma Donoghues 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
Synopsis
Hood is a bittersweet, sexy, beautifully written romance set in contemporary Ireland. In the late 70s, convent school teenager Pen OGrady 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.
Synopsis
As an Irish convent school teenager in the late '70s, Pen O'Grady fell in love with Cara Wall. And although Cara was always engaged in unrequited love for other people, their unconventional relationship survives until their late twenties, when Cara dies in a car accident. Pen's narration covers the week of the funeral and fourteen years of baffling memories about Cara. This is a bittersweet, sexy, beautifully written tale about romance and loss.
About the Author
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.