The gruff friendship-with-benefits of two gold prospectors in the Yukon (“Snowblind”) is portrayed as tenderly as the marriage of two refugees from the Irish potato famine, thwarted of their reunion in Canada (“Counting the Days”). She can empathize with a Victorian Londoner forced into prostitution (“Onward”) as well as with a buccaneering cheat who fraudulently obtains her husband’s fortune and skips out of 18th-century New York (“The Widow’s Cruse”). Donoghue offers her own biography-Irish-born, Cambridge-educated, longtime resident in Canada-to explain her fascination with other wanderers trying to invent new lives for themselves. This book demonstrates once again that there’s little she can’t do well indeed, the afterword is as moving as the stories. Past and present have held equal sway over her imagination in previous work, and three story collections have showcased her abundant gifts as aptly as her seven novels. It’s characteristic of the restless Donoghue to follow up a terrifying contemporary thriller and international best-seller ( Room, 2010, etc.) with a collection of historical fiction. Fourteen tales of people cut loose from their roots-voluntarily or not.
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