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HAVEN

Emma Donoghue

Three men vow to leave the world behind them. They set out in a small boat for an island their leader has seen in a dream, with only faith to guide them. What they find is the extraordinary island now known as Skellig Michael. HAVEN, Emma Donoghue's deeply researched new novel, has her trademark psychological intensity - but this story is like nothing she has ever written before.
In seventh-century Ireland, a scholar and priest called Artt has a dream telling him to leave the sinful world behind. Taking two monks - young Trian and old Cormac - he rows down the river Shannon in search of an isolated spot on which to found a monastery. 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. In such a place, what will survival mean?

Born in Dublin in 1969, Emma Donoghue is an Irish emigrant twice over: she spent eight years in Cambridge doing a PhD in eighteenth-century literature before moving to London, Ontario, where she lives with her partner and their two children. She also migrates between genres, writing literary history, biography, stage and radio plays as well as fairy tales and short stories. She is best known for her novels, which range from the historical (Slammerkin, Life Mask, Landing, The Sealed Letter) to the contemporary (Stir-Fry, Hood, Landing). Her international bestseller Room was a New York Times Best Book of 2010 and was a finalist for the Man Booker, Commonwealth, and Orange Prizes (more than 2.2 million copies have been sold to date). Her books have been published in more than 40 languages. Her most recent novel, The Pull of the Stars, was a New York Times and international bestseller, and longlisted for the Giller Prize.
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Published 2022-08-23 by Little, Brown

Comments

HAVEN creates an eerie, meditative atmosphere that should resonate with anyone willing to think deeply about the blessings and costs of devoting one's life to a transcendent cause... Donoghue works subtly in the margins, letting these three men evolve into their distinct roles. Their foolish destruction of the island's resources will resonate with contemporary readers, but she refuses to reduce these characters to symbols of modern exigencies... The effect is transporting, sometimes unsettling and eventually shocking. Read more...

What a beautiful, intense, blazing, richly-woven yet spartan and unsparing book this is. I couldn't put it down. Lyrical and then visceral, appearing at one moment tranquil and another so intense it's like being bitten and clawed... It is both a story about three men of God surviving with almost nothing on an island, and another about dictatorship, isolation, true fraternity, love, the nature of faith and man's place in the natural world.

Each new book by Room author Emma Donoghue is cause for celebration. Her latest, Haven, takes place in 7th century Ireland. It's there that a charismatic leader sets out with two other men to start a novel version of life according to God. Their new home? A remote island whose only population is thousands of birds. Today we know this true-to-life island as Skellig Michael, but it's through Donoghue's signature style that the past comes alive. Read more...

Haven is a beautiful and timely novel about isolation, passion and the conflict between obedience and self-preservation. The island setting and the characters stayed with me long after I finished reading.

Deliciously claustrophobic... Donoghue (The Wonder; Frog Music) excels at creating isolated atmospheres and examining the dynamic of small casts of characters--as in Room or The Pull of the Stars... Haven may be just one letter away from heaven, but this island community looks less like either and more like a prison as time goes on. A powerful study of religious obsession and confinement, this is one for readers of Matrix and To Paradise. Shelf Talker: Emma Donoghue's 12th novel is an intense character study of three seventh-century monks who found a monastery on a remote Irish island. Read more...

...brilliantly realized, utterly transporting new novel... Donoghue's detailing of the island's rugged geography and the methodical subsistence work of its dogged new stewards is masterful, almost hypnotic, but it's the author's quietly devastating depiction of the conflict between faith and survival, obedience and self-preservation, that powers this extraordinary novel. Read more...

This is a powerful read with careful attention paid to balancing natural and historical detail with a broader exploration of faith, madness, survival, and what it means to be human. Read more...

Inspired by the true history of an early Christian monastery founded on Ireland's Skellig Islands, Haven explores the mix of superstition, lore, faith and basic need that accompanies humanity on a mission. As in her hit bestseller, Room, Donoghue's powers of description expand small, confined spaces until they contain worlds of universal depth... Thoughtful and thought-provoking, Haven captures the gulf that can grow - especially during times of hardship - between what we say we believe and how we live.

The island reflects a common feature of Donoghue's novels: confinement. Room is an obvious example, while The Pull of the Stars is set in a small maternity flu ward in Dublin and The Wonder in a cabin... As Greene, Spark and Mauriac knew, the Catholic novel provides a perfect confined space in which to examine, love, faith, grace and, in this one, friendship.

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.

HAVEN. In 7th C, #Ireland, three men set sail to a bird-thick island to find God. #EmmaDonoghue (ROOM) combines pressure-cooker intensity + radical isolation, to stunning effect. What is Divine Grace? Purity of soul? Virtue? Not what they think.

Taking one of her regular breaks from contemporary fiction, Donoghue has left behind none of her ability to spin a compelling story and people it with sharp characterizations... Read more...

UK: Picador UK ; CAN: HarperCollins Canada ; Hungary: XXI Szazad

A surprisingly compelling and suspenseful adventure... a marvel of detailed, intimate storytelling... In fact, this short novel is really a parable about the narcissism of the religious fanatic, and the contrasting endurance of human communities. The three monks represent the conflicting religious imperatives of faith versus works in the most vivid way possible, although there's no doubt which side we're meant to sympathize with more. The austere beauties of Skellig Michael make the island itself a fourth character, earning this book a place among classics of ecological fiction. Read more...

Told with the clarity of a fable, Haven transports us into territories unknown, where 'fog makes an island of every man.' Donoghue's men of the cloth confront challenges that rattle not only their faith in God, but their faith in each other and in the natural world. This is a patient, thoughtful novel with much to say about spirituality, hope, and human failure, and about the miracle of mercy.

[A] timely allegory in which three monks face a test of their faith on an uninhabited island... Though this is a text replete with religious fable, it's in descriptions of the physical world that Donoghue's prose soars and the narrative's claustrophobia is alleviated. Likewise, among themes that include isolation and devotion, its ecological warnings are its most resonant.

Donoghue's (The Pull of the Stars, 2020) prose glimmers with images of the pristine natural world, including many varieties of sea birds, but as Artt's sanctimonious piety increasingly challenges common sense, Cormac and Trian wonder if their vows of obedience will doom them. As always, Donoghue extracts realistic emotions from characters interacting within close quarters and delicately explores the demands of faith. This evocative historical novel also works as a cautionary tale about the dangers of religious control. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Donoghue's readers and all lovers of thought-provoking literary fiction will be looking for this quietly dramatic tale.