Haven

Emma Donoghue

18 August 2022
9781529091182
515 pages

Synopsis

A story of survival set in 600 AD Ireland; a parable of patriarchy, destruction and religion at sea, by Emma Donoghue, the bestselling author of Room.

'Everything a novel should be: compassionate, unpredictable, and questioning. Haven is Donoghue at her strange, unsettling best.' - Maggie O'Farrell, author of Hamnet

Shortlisted for the Dublin Literary Award

In seventh-century Ireland, a priest has a dream telling him to leave the sinful world behind. Taking two monks with him, he travels down the Shannon in search of an isolated spot on which to found a new place of worship. Drifting out into the Atlantic, the three men find an impossibly steep, bare island inhabited by tens of thousands of birds, and claim it for God. But in such a place, far from all other humanity, what will survival mean?

Haven is a beautiful, bold blaze of a book’ – Rachel Joyce, author of The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry

‘Beautiful and timely’ - Sarah Moss, author of Summerwater

‘Sinister, heart-wrenching and beautifully written’ – The Times

‘Combines pressure-cooker intensity and radical isolation, to stunning effect’ – Margaret Atwood via Twitter


Book of the Year pick in The Irish Times, The Guardian, The Irish Post, RTÉ and The Times.

A remarkably engrossing tale
This book kept me up half the night - I was unable to put it down, and read it in one spellbound gulp. It is everything a novel should be: compassionate, unpredictable, and questioning. Haven is Donoghue at her strange, unsettling best.
Brooding, dreamlike . . . it’s in descriptions of the physical world that Donoghue’s prose soars . . . Likewise, among themes that include isolation and devotion, its ecological warnings are its most resonant.