![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Themes of imprisonment run through both novels, as do questions of what it means to be related. But the pair are as unable to escape one another as Room’s Ma and Jack. Noah and Michael are free to cross the Atlantic, change hotels on a whim, eat ice-creams and churros for dinner if they choose (which Michael, to Noah’s weary resignation, does regularly). But the more I turned the pages, the more evident the similarities became. ![]() Akin introduces New York professor Noah Selvaggio, a widower preparing a trip to his birth city of Nice for his 80th birthday, whose plans are thrown into chaos when he is obliged, at the last minute, to bring his 11-year-old great-nephew, Michael, with him.Ītmospherically, the two novels could hardly be further apart: Room is lightless, squalid, oppressive Akin is set for the most part amid the restaurants and promenades and bright, caressing sun of the French Riviera. Room, which was shortlisted for the Booker and Orange prizes and subsequently became an Oscar-nominated screenplay by Donoghue herself, is a horror story: the taut, terrifying tale of a mother and son imprisoned together in an 11ft-by-11ft bunker by a man who is both the boy’s father and the mother’s kidnapper and rapist. At first glance, the two seem to bear little relation to each other. E mma Donoghue usually writes historical novels Akin is her first contemporary work since Room, the book that made her a household name in 2010. ![]()
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