Latest news with #EmmaDonoghue
CBC
27-05-2025
- Entertainment
- CBC
3 'diverse' historical fiction novels that transport you to another time
Ever since she was a child, CBC Books associate producer and columnist Talia Kliot has been drawn to historical fiction. While she enjoys stories set in eras or places she already finds intriguing, what truly captivates her is the genre's ability to introduce readers to unfamiliar histories and cultures. "I like to look for books that are part of different time periods and different places that I don't necessarily know so much about," said Kliot. "The stuff that we don't always cover in school, the places that I've never been, or never even thought of exploring." The 2025 CBC Poetry Prize is now open For Kliot, historical fiction is more than escapism; it's a way to learn about the world through the lens of personal stories and lived experience. On The Next Chapter with Antonio Michael Downing, she shared three of her recent favourites — diverse novels set in different countries and time periods — and what she learned from them. The Paris Express by Emma Donoghue The Paris Express provides a vivid account of late 19th-century France, exploring the fears and desires of the time through a group of passengers — diverse in their social class, age and occupation, aboard the Granville-Paris express. The fascinating stories of the passengers, including a young boy traveling solo, a pregnant woman on the run, a medical student and the devoted railway workers, are woven around the central, suspenseful plot of a young anarchist on a mission. But this is no ordinary journey. The story unfolds on the day of the infamous 1895 French railway disaster. Donoghue is an Irish Canadian writer whose books include the novels Landing, Room, Frog Music, The Wonder, The Pull of the Stars, Learned by Heart and the children's book The Lotterys Plus One. Room was an international bestseller and was adapted into a critically acclaimed film starring Brie Larson. Talia Kliot says: "Trains in this period are new, they're exciting. [They] are the hot commodity. It connects all of Europe, the whole country. [Donoghue] just plops you in the head of each [of] the perspective of each of the characters... they all have such distinct personalities and perspectives. The humanness and the stuckness of all of them on this train really shines through, through the jumping of perspectives." In Finding Flora, Scottish newcomer to Canada, Flora, escapes her abusive husband to the Alberta prairie, determined to rebuild her life. But when a hostile government threatens their land and her violent husband is on the hunt for her, Flora forms a bond with her neighbours — a Welsh widow with three children, two American women raising chickens and a Métis woman training wild horses. United, the women come together to face their challenges. Elinor Florence is an author, journalist and member of the Métis Nation of B.C. Her debut novel was Bird's Eye View, and her second novel, Wildwood, was one of Kobo's Hundred Most Popular Canadian Books of All Time. Florence holds degrees in English and journalism. She grew up in Saskatchewan and currently lives in Invermere, B.C. Talia Kliot says: "It's really powerful to see these people of different backgrounds who don't necessarily all get along super well at the beginning, because they don't want to be lumped in together as the 'women homesteaders [who] all need help.' They want to prove that they can do it on their own, but end up finding such a powerful community and togetherness in the work that they're doing." The Immortal Woman by Su Chang In the novel The Immortal Woman, Lemei's daughter, Lin, struggles with distancing herself from her Chinese heritage while studying in America. At the same time, she is taken aback by her mother's increasing nationalism toward China — this shift is especially surprising considering her mother had once been a student Red Guard leader who had witnessed the atrocities of the Tiananmen Square protests. Su Chang is a Chinese Canadian writer born and raised in Shanghai. The Immortal Woman is her debut novel. Her writing has been recognized in numerous contests, including Prairie Fire's Short Fiction Contest, the Master Review's Novel Excerpt Contest and the Canadian Authors Association Toronto National Writing Contest, among the others. Talia Kliot says:"I really like how you're learning about history and a time period that, like, I really didn't know a lot about, but you're learning it through humans, through stories, through people that you can relate to. We're learning about politics, but you're getting such a human perspective, and this mother-daughter relationship that mothers and daughters can certainly relate to."
Hamilton Spectator
26-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Hamilton Spectator
10 of the most promising theatre productions this summer outside of Toronto, Stratford and Shaw
The Toronto theatre season might be winding down, but that doesn't mean there's nothing happening on stages this spring and summer. And I'm not talking about the Stratford and Shaw festivals, which should obviously already be on your to-do list. Just a couple of hours from the GTA you'll find plenty of entertaining plays and musicals, including a few world premieres. Here's a roundup of some buzzy shows in Ontario that, combined with a picnic lunch or B&B stay, would make a perfect day trip or weekend escape. Who: Emma Donoghue Where: Blyth Festival in Blyth The Dublin-born and now London, Ont.-based Emma Donoghue is best known as the author of the bestselling novel 'Room,' which was made into an Oscar-winning film and adapted for the stage several years ago. Now she's debuting a folk musical about Henry and Jane Johnson, a real-life couple who left the Great Irish Famine of the 1840s to settle in Southwestern Ontario. Landon Doak ('Peter Pan,' 'Alice in Wonderland') and Shelayna Christante (Bad Hats Theatre's 'Narnia') star as the couple, and both will sing traditional songs and Irish ballads in this poignant work, directed by Blyth's artistic director, Gil Garratt. From June 26 to Aug. 12. Visit for details. Who: Cale Crowe and Genevieve Adam Where: Capitol Theatre in Port Hope Toronto theatregoers will recognize writer/actor Genevieve Adam from her historical dramas 'Dark Heart,' 'Heartless' and 'Deceitful Above all Things.' Now she's teamed up with Anishnaabe singer/songwriter Cale Crowe for 'Rez Gas,' a musical about a man (John Wamsley from '1939' ) who leaves his reservation to pursue a music career, only to return home. Young People's Theatre's Herbie Barnes directs a cast that includes Cheri Maracle, Jonathan Fisher and Dillan Chiblow. From Aug. 22 to Sep. 7. Visit for details. Who: Rebecca Northan Where: Here for Now Theatre in Stratford Is there anything Rebecca Northan can't do? The Dora Award-winning creator of international hit 'Blind Date,' alum of both Stratford and Shaw festivals, and one-third of the recent Toronto Theatre Critics' Award-winning ensemble for 'Goblin:Macbeth' now presents a new comedy. 'Stick Around' is about a woman in her mid-40s who seeks life advice from her mother, who's been diagnosed with terminal cancer. Directed by Kevin Kruchkywich, the play is loosely inspired by Northan's own personal experience during the last eight weeks with her mother. So expect a mix of laughter and tears when the play helps inaugurate the company's brand new venue. From May 28 to June 8. Visit for details. Who: Norm Foster Where: Orillia Opera House in Orillia Back in the early aughts, Norm Foster — considered Canada's most prolific and most produced playwright — wrote 'The Love List,' about two middle-aged men who were searching for the ideal woman. Now Foster is creating gender parity in 'A Woman's Love List,' a new comedy about two women who write down all the qualities they want in a man … and he suddenly appears. From July 3 to 18. Visit for details. Who: Megan Murphy Where: 4th Line Theatre in Millbrook Audiences at the outdoor 4th Line Theatre know to expect works that draw on the history and heritage of the rural region just southwest of Peterborough. Megan Murphy's 'Wild Irish Geese' tells the story of Irish people who left poverty in the old country (see also 'The Wind Coming Over the Sea,' above) to settle in Scott's Plains, later renamed Peterborough. The company's managing artistic director, Kim Blackwell, directs this premiere production. From July 29 to Aug. 30. Visit for details. Who: Robert Harling Where: Capitol Theatre The film adaptation is a beloved classic, so why doesn't Robert Harling's comedy drama — about a group of women in the American South — get more professional revivals? Well, never you mind. Just take the 401 to Port Hope to see Courtney Ch'ng Lancaster's production, featuring Raquel Duffy, Belinda Corpuz, Carolyn Fe, Brenda Robins and — as the play's mother/daughter combo — Deborah Drakeford and Charlotte Dennis, who are mother and daughter in real life. Remember to bring tissues. From July 18 to Aug. 3. Visit for details. Who: Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice Where: Huron Country Playhouse in Grand Bend and Hamilton Family Theatre in Cambridge Even if you caught the recent 50th-anniversary revival of Andrew Lloyd Webber's groundbreaking musical, you might want to check it out again in this Drayton Theatre production. Especially with stars like Stratford leading man Robert Markus as Jesus, Shaw Fest vet Emily Lukasik as Mary Magdalene and original 'Come From Away' Broadway cast member Lee MacDougall as Pontius Pilate. They're joined by Christopher Ning (a standout in the recent off-Mirvish production of 'Titanique' ) and Jade McLeod ('Jagged Little Pill' North American tour). From June 11 to 28 and July 3 to 27. Visit for details. Who: Mark Crawford Where: Thousand Islands Playhouse in Gananoque Like Foster, prolific actor/writer Mark Crawford's comedies are hugely popular yet rarely get produced in Toronto. (The only professional production we've seen is 'Bed & Breakfast' at Soulpepper .) So it might be worth the trek east to the gorgeous Thousand Islands area to see this side-splitting comedy about the lead-up to a wedding, with a cast that includes Shaw regular Emily Lukasik, Amelia Sargisson ('Red Velvet') and 'Come From Away' actor Kyle Brown, all directed by the Dora-winning Cherissa Richards. From Aug. 22 to Sept. 14. Visit for details. Who: Annabel Fitzsimmons, Alison Lawrence and Mary Francis Moore Where: County Stage Company in Prince Edward County I was a huge fan of Annabel Fitzsimmons, Alison Lawrence and Mary Francis Moore 's play 'Bittergirl' when it premiered way back in 1999. The show, about finding the humour in getting dumped, was turned into a book several years later and then, eventually, a musical featuring songs from the 1960s and '70s. Even the Mirvishes helped develop it. The show has been produced across the country, but never in Toronto. Prince Edward County isn't too far from the GTA. So grab your besties, order tickets and hope you don't run into your exes during intermission or at the neighbouring wineries. From July 18 to Aug. 13. Visit for details. Who: Anne Chislett Where: Blyth Festival Anne Chislett's moving drama set in a small Amish community on the eve of the Second World War premiered at the Blyth Festival in 1981 and won the Governor General's Award two years later. Productions of this Canadian classic are rare, so don't miss this opportunity to see it performed at the festival's atmospheric outdoor Harvest Stage, directed by Severn Thompson and with a cast headed by two of stalwarts of the theatre scene, Randy Hughson and Michelle Fisk. From July 3 to Aug. 23. Visit for details.
CBC
11-04-2025
- Entertainment
- CBC
In her latest novel, Emma Donoghue boards a train destined for disaster
Set in 1895, Emma Donoghue's latest novel The Paris Express takes readers all aboard a suspenseful train journey from the Normandy coast to Paris. Inspired by a real-life photo of a train hanging off the side of Montparnasse station, she crafted a story that unravels over the course of one fateful day, featuring the fascinating stories of the passengers, from a young boy traveling solo to a pregnant woman on the run, the devoted railway workers and a young anarchist on a mission. Drawing on real people from history and thorough research, The Paris Express is rooted in the political and social themes of the late 19th century. "A lot of this stuff from history is just more interesting than I could invent," said Donoghue, known for her historical fiction writing, on Bookends with Mattea Roach. "Some writers may have imaginations that need no starting substance in the Petri dish, but I don't." Donoghue is an Irish Canadian writer whose books include the novels Landing, Room, Frog Music, The Wonder, The Pull of the Stars, Learned by Heart and the children's book The Lotterys Plus One. Room was an international bestseller and was adapted into a critically acclaimed film starring Brie Larson. She joined Roach to discuss the complexities of the time and the process of writing a novel steeped in historical accuracy. Mattea Roach: How would you describe the role of the railway in France at the end of the 19th century? Why did you want to set a novel at this time and dive into trains? Emma Donoghue: What attracted me was the disaster. I don't want to give any details, but basically there was a famous train disaster and famous photographs of that disaster. I knew that I had to write about this train disaster because the image of that photograph is just so surreal and memorable and has been a popular image on album covers and dorm rooms. But I also was delighted to seize the chance to write about a disaster of any kind because I love the fact that, when a day goes wrong, when a plane goes upside down at Toronto airport, it's affecting all these different people. So it's a wonderful test of character. Would we be the ones helpfully holding the hand of the person beside us or would we be clambering over their heads trying to get our laptops? I wanted a disaster novel and trains were so key to the time. If you see a map of the train lines of Europe, you can see how they made everything possible. They transported talented people like one of the characters on my train, Alice, she's working for Gaumont. She's basically going to invent films the next year. She's there asking her boss for permission to use the camera they have on the weekends. He doesn't see the future, but she does. There's another man on my train, Bienvenue, who's a boy from Brittany and he wants to invent a subway for Paris. Everybody's saying it's a crazy idea. So Paris was this extraordinary centre of the world in that people with any kind of get up and go to them — rebels, bohemians, anarchists, queers — everybody wanted to get to Paris. Being able to get to the big city easily was one thing the trains offered. So there's this extraordinary circulatory system whizzing people to Europe and whizzing products like camembert — the camembert was able to get to its market because trains could move it fast enough that it hadn't rotted. MR: I understand in the process of crafting this novel you spent some time living in Paris. What was it that appealed to you about Paris as a writer that made you want to go first of all, spend a bunch of your own time there, and then really dive in with a historian's lens? ED: It was the other way around. I was going there because my partner is a professor of French and we've spent a few years in France. In the past, we've mostly gone to the lovely warm South, but this time, the kids were older. We thought Paris would be more interesting. So I was going to spend a year there anyway. The only apartment I could find happened to be in the area of Montparnasse on the left bank. So I Googled Montparnasse and there I found the photograph of this crash. I just felt an iron fist gripping my heart saying, "You have to write a book about this." It's the only time I've ever planned to write a book in a place before I go there. I just felt an iron fist gripping my heart saying, "You have to write a book about this." So it wasn't so much being inspired by the place and a novel gradually occurring to me. It was a feeling of, "Okay, this is how I'm going to be spending my year. I'm going to be living in 2022-23, but also in 1895. Every pastry I eat is going to be relevant to the story." MR: How would you describe the role of gender in your writing? ED: It's the door that has opened the way onto a long corridor out of which other doors have opened. I was a very middle class, comfortable girl who did well in school. My awareness of gender and of basically the oppression of women in my teens, especially in the Irish context where there was no reproductive healthcare and so on. That helped make me aware of all the ways in which we are not the norm. Then, when I realized I was queer as well at 14, again, I was like, wow, talk about society's unwritten rules. I'm the other. I'm the one who I thought everybody would hate and despise. And I thought the villagers would come with their fiery torches. That means that I have gone on to write a lot about people of other races, about disability, about people put on show as freaks, about enslavement. So I think it has just sort of opened the doors of my mind. Gender was where it all began and I've retained a very vivid interest in the ways that gender rules structure the world and can limit everybody. I was trying to capture the ways in which trains have often included flirting or picking up strangers. One thing I tried to do in The Paris Express was rather than having the characters who are privileged and nasty and then the brave rebels — I really tried to mix it up. So for instance, there's a sort of unexpected, man, man sexual encounter in the book. I deliberately gave that to a character who's very entitled. He's not a good guy. And yet at that particular moment, I give him this joyful, unexpected encounter because I was trying to capture the ways in which trains have often included flirting or picking up strangers. They bring people together and keep them cooped up together.
The Guardian
22-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
The Paris Express by Emma Donoghue review
When an express train smashes through the barriers at Montparnasse, screeches across the concourse and emerges through an exterior wall, panicked onlookers assume it's a terrorist attack. Plus ça change; this happened in October 1895 and is the inspiration for Emma Donoghue's new novel, which takes place on that train as it hurtles from Granville to Paris. Donoghue specialises in contained settings. She is best known for the 2010 novel Room, narrated by a child who has been raised in a single room by his kidnapped mother. The Wonder is set mostly in a cramped 19th-century rural Irish cottage, then in 2020 came The Pull of the Stars, located, with eerie prescience, in the pandemic isolation ward of a Dublin maternity hospital in 1918. Most recently, there was 2022's Haven, where Donoghue isolates three seventh-century monks on a speck of rock in the Irish Sea. A 19th-century express train is a neat way to contain a bigger slice of life, a social history with passengers pre-divided into first, second and third class (third at the front, naturally, to absorb coal dust and the impact of possible collisions). Each carriage is 'as intimate as a dinner party, but one with no host and guests assembled at random'. And as the maids and anarchists, artists and playwrights, medics, engineers and politicians mingle, we glimpse issues of race, sexuality and poverty through concerns ranging from the petty (bad smells, needing the loo) to the cataclysmic (impending childbirth, possible mass murder). The passenger we spend most time with is an angry young class warrior, Mado, 'upright as a toy soldier in a straight skirt, a collar and tie, brilliantined hair cut to just below the ears'. Early on, we discover that the lunch bucket she clutches might contain something more sinister than sandwiches. Blonska, an elderly Russian in gauzy hand-me-downs, is the only one to clock this. We also meet 22-year-old Marcelle, a half-Cuban medical student who can't resist diagnosing her fellow passenger, a sick 18-year-old girl who bruises easily and suffers night sweats. In another carriage we find Alice Guy, secretary at the photographic company Gaumont, trying to convince her dull boss that the Lumière brothers' technique of stringing images together has more than documentary potential; it could be 'something really captivating'. This train, then, contains real historical figures. Some (the politicians and the crew) were indeed there; others, as Donoghue writes in an afterword, are 'plausible guests'. These include Irish playwright John Synge, seen scribbling in a notebook, and one-armed civil engineer Fulgence Bienvenüe, who tells his fellow travellers, husband and wife Émile Levassor and Louise Sarazin-Levassor, about his plan for underground electrified trains in Paris. Levassor, a motorcar enthusiast, pooh-poohs this ludicrous notion; in 10 years, he says, everyone will have a motorcar. (The real Émile, Donoghue's note tells us, pioneered the motorcar industry, and Louise became 'Mother of the Motorcar' after he died from – yes – car crash injuries.) These knowing winks are fun, if a little pantomimic. There is a sense of people swapping historically pertinent information. Showgirl Annah, once an artist's model, tells Synge how one painter, Gauguin, treated her badly so she sold all his belongings, except the 'stupid pictures' no one would buy. In less skilled hands, all these characters might become a roster of types, or simply meld, but Donoghue is too deft and intelligent to let us lose our way, giving them props – hummingbird earrings, a bucket of oysters, a wooden arm – so that we may move in and out of carriages and still recognise people. Very occasionally, a more intriguing consciousness muscles in: the train itself. 'Since Granville, Engine 721 has been scenting danger somewhere along her flanks.' This is curious, unexpected, and has weird potential. I longed for more. But there is no time for that. The form offers frustratingly limited scope for character complexity or nuance. Instead, there is a lively Agatha Christie feel, with potted biographies and neat social commentary fuelled by the key question: can anyone survive this? As Engine 721 clatters towards Paris, we bounce between stories while Mado's lunch bucket provides what Blonska calls the 'agony of this suspense'. But Donoghue's central concern is more existential. It is almost Beckettian, really, this vision of life as individuals crammed into metal containers, enduring clanking discomforts and talking at each other as they move towards the inevitable end. The real question is human and timeless and, frankly, rather apposite. As Blonska puts it: 'How to carry on minute by minute, when you don't know how long you've got.' The Paris Express by Emma Donoghue is published by Picador (£18.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at Delivery charges may apply.
Yahoo
18-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
'Absolutely compelled': How a historical image led to author writing 'The Paris Express'
Author Emma Donoghue joins Morning Joe to discuss 'The Paris Express,' her new work of historical fiction about an 1895 train crash in Paris. The book is based on an actual event.
