Writer scores €1m deal for 'Fritzl' novel
Emma Donoghue: novelist say story idea came in a flash
Monday November 16 2009
A LITTLE-KNOWN Irish writer has hit the big time with a novel inspired by the Josef Fritzl case in Austria.
A LITTLE-KNOWN Irish writer has hit the big time with a novel inspired by the Josef Fritzl case in Austria.
The novel, by literary writer Emma Donoghue, has been sold to publishers in Britain and the US for over €1m.
Fritzl locked his daughter in a basement prison for 24 years, raped her and had children with her, some of whom never saw sunlight until their release as teenagers.
Donoghue's novel, titled 'Room', is about a boy and his mother who have been held captive in a garden shed for most of the boy's life. The story is told in the voice of five-year-old Jack, who thinks the locked room he lives in is the whole world. To protect him, his mother has never told him about the outside.
Donoghue's novel also has strong echoes of the recent Jaycee Dugard case in California, which may explain the intense interest of international publishers in the book.
In spite of the similarity, however, Donoghue says her inspiration was the Fritzl case. She says she had already been working on the novel for months before the Dugard story broke.
"'Room' was first inspired by the Fritzl case but I wanted to make the scenario considerably less horrifying by granting my characters the gift of sunlight," Donoghue said recently. "It did indeed give me shivers when I read about Jaycee Dugard. As a mother, what impresses me most is how she home-schooled those girls after the minimal education she'd had herself."
The idea for the book came to her in April last year, shortly after Fritzl's story came to light.
"I was driving along a highway when 'Room' came to me in a flash," Donoghue said.
"If such a story of being born into captivity were told from the child's point of view, I thought, it would not be a horror or sob story, but a journey from one world to another."
The novel, based on extensive research, has been described by a Picador editor as intense and "very special", combining Cormac McCarthy's powerful depiction of a parent's love for a child in 'The Road' with the compelling storytelling of 'The Lovely Bones' by Alice Sebold.
Originally from Dublin but now living in Canada, Donoghue is best known for historical fiction and lesbian literature. Although her first historical novel 'Slammerkin', a murder story about a prostitute in 18th Century London, was a bestseller, her more recent books have been less successful.
But she has hit the jackpot with 'Room', which will be published next summer. After an auction among publishers last week, 'Room' was bought by Picador in the UK for over £200,000 (€224,000) and Little, Brown in the US for over $1.2m (€803,000). The UK rights include Ireland, Australia and New Zealand. The book will also be published by HarperCollins in Canada and is already being translated into French, Italian, Dutch and Hebrew.
Emma Donoghue was born in Dublin in 1969, the daughter of Denis Donoghue, a former Professor of English at UCD, who now teaches in the US.
She studied English at UCD and Cambridge, where she met her partner, the Canadian academic Christine Roulston. The couple live in Ontario with their children Finn and Una.
Jack, the central character in 'Room', is two years younger than Donoghue's son Finn. In the book, Jack and Ma live in a locked room. When he turns five, he starts to ask questions, and his mother reveals to him that there is a world outside.
Told entirely in Jack's voice, the publishers say the book is not a horror story or tearjerker, but a celebration of resilience and the love between parent and child.
- John Spain, Books Editor
Irish Independent
