Other editions of book Room: A Novel

From The Observer: The first half takes place within the 12-foot-square room in which a young woman has spent 7 years since being abducted aged 19. Raped repeatedly, she now has a 5-year-old boy, Jack, and it is with his voice that Donoghue tells their story. "Ma" has clearly spent his 5 years devoting every scrap of mental energy to nurturing her boy, preserving her own sanity in the process. To read this book is to stumble on a completely private world. Every family unit has its own language, and Donoghue captures this exquisitely. Ma has created characters out of all aspects of their room - Wardrobe, Rug, Plant, Meltedy Spoon. They have a TV, but Ma limits the time they are allowed to watch it for fear of turning their brains to mush. Ma has a supply of stories - from the Berlin Wall and Princess Di to fairytales like Hansel and Gretel to hybrids in which Jack becomes Prince Jackerjack, Gullijack in Lilliput: his mother's own fairytale hero. And really, what is a story of a girl locked in a shed with her innocently precocious boy if not the most macabre fairytale? When Ma's kidnapper comes to the room in the evening, she makes Jack hide in the wardrobe, where he listens as they get into bed: But the grotesque is balanced with the uplifting. Thereafter, the setting moved to "Outside", the relationship diluted by alternative voices, by the number of new things with which Jack has to deal, the novel has the more familiar feel of the naive child narratives of Roddy Doyle and Mark Haddon. Jack's introduction to the confusing world of freedom is handled with incredible skill - as is his first separation from Ma. But the novel, like Jack, now has to follow a more logical and straightforward path. In the hands of this novelist, Jack's tale is more than a victim-and-survivor story: it works as a study of child development, shows the power of language and storytelling, and is a poem in praise of motherhood and parental love.

It's Jack's birthday, and he's excited about turning five. Jack lives with his Ma in Room, which has a locked door and a skylight, and measures 11 feet by 11 feet. He loves watching TV, and the cartoon characters he calls friends, but he knows that nothing he sees on screen is truly real – only him, Ma and the things in Room. Until the day Ma admits that there's a world outside... Told in Jack's voice, Room is the story of a mother and son whose love lets them survive the impossible. Unsentimental and sometimes funny, devastating yet uplifting, Room is a novel like no other.

It's Jack's birthday, and he's excited about turning five. Jack lives with his Ma in Room, which has a locked door and a skylight, and measures 11 feet by 11 feet. He loves watching TV, and the cartoon characters he calls friends, but he knows that nothing he sees on screen is truly real – only him, Ma and the things in Room. Until the day Ma admits that there's a world outside... Told in Jack's voice, Room is the story of a mother and son whose love lets them survive the impossible. Unsentimental and sometimes funny, devastating yet uplifting, Room is a novel like no other.

It's Jack's birthday, and he's excited about turning five. Jack lives with his Ma in Room, which has a locked door and a skylight, and measures 11 feet by 11 feet. He loves watching TV, and the cartoon characters he calls friends, but he knows that nothing he sees on screen is truly real – only him, Ma and the things in Room. Until the day Ma admits that there's a world outside... Told in Jack's voice, Room is the story of a mother and son whose love lets them survive the impossible. Unsentimental and sometimes funny, devastating yet uplifting, Room is a novel like no other.