Book Review | Astray: Short tales long on believability

By For The Columbus Dispatch  • 

Historical fiction is usually slow, dense and detailed, allowing the reader to become immersed in the warm bath of a different time. The brief and startling stories in Emma Donoghue’s Astray are more like shocking dunks into the cold water of lives both like our own and startlingly different.

The author of the best-selling Room is drawn to quirky, provocative details: A sentence or two found in an old newspaper or a book will lead her into a sharp narrative about the turning point of a character’s life.

Each of the 14 stories in Astray is followed by a note on the sources that inspired it, and, in the case of stories about real individuals, follow-up information on what’s known about the rest of their lives.

Most of the stories are set in the United States and Canada, where Donoghue, who was born and brought up in Ireland, now lives. The earliest one is set at Plymouth Plantation in 1639; the latest, in Newmarket, Ontario, in 1968.

Most of the others take place in the 19th century. These are stories of exiles, outsiders and people leaving, voluntarily or not, one place or way of being for another.

One of the best is the Plymouth Plantation story, The Lost Seed, which is based on a few cryptic legal records of the case of Richard Berry, who accused several others in the colony of sex crimes. Donoghue condenses several years of Berry’s thoughts into a few charged pages and has enough empathy with him to make him both appalling and pitiable.

Donoghue knows how to find a telling moment: Last Supper at Brown’s, set in Texas during the Civil War and based on a newspaper clipping, looks at the night when a slave and his master’s wife make a decision that will change the course of their lives.

She often uses letters, and the voices found there, to craft a story. The Gift expands on the correspondence between the birth mother of a child sent west on one of the 19th-century “orphan trains” and her adoptive parents to create a poignant sense of a struggle without any villains.

Counting the Days uses passages from letters between a husband who has moved to Quebec and the wife who is joining him from Ireland to illuminate the nature of their marriage.

Most of the stories are taut, vivid and memorable, and the collection reveals Donoghue’s remarkable gift for placing herself in the minds of people who otherwise might be lost to history.