Emma Donoghue Books in Order

Donoghue's first book surveys British writing on lesbian themes from 1668 to 1801. Drawing on everything from trial records to plays and poems, it opens up a buried literary history.

Seventeen-year-old Maria leaves rural Ireland for college in Dublin and lands in an unexpected living situation with a lesbian couple. What starts as confusion becomes a sharp, funny coming-of-age story about friendship, desire, and self-knowledge.

After her lover Cara dies in a car crash, Penelope O'Grady is left grieving in secret. Over one raw week in Dublin, memory, guilt, humor, and desire force her to imagine a life beyond hiding.

A memory play about vaudeville star Annie Hindle, who on the night of her comeback relives two marriages, one to a man and one to a woman. Donoghue blends theatre history, performance, and private longing.

Thirteen linked fairy-tale retellings peel back the old stories and give them stranger, sharper lives. Princesses, witches, and girls in flight pass wisdom from one tale to the next.

Donoghue reconstructs the lives of Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper, the Victorian writers and lovers who published together as Michael Field. It is a compact, deeply researched portrait of collaboration, secrecy, and literary ambition.

Set over one eventful night in a Dublin hotel, this collaborative novel follows guests in different rooms whose stories brush against each other. Emma Donoghue's contribution adds to a funny, poignant portrait of women in crisis and transition.

Inspired by an eighteenth-century murder case, this novel follows Mary Saunders, a poor girl with a hunger for fine clothes and a better life. Her climb through London and beyond is gritty, ambitious, and headed for danger.

This inventive collection reimagines odd episodes from the history of the British Isles. Donoghue turns forgotten scandals, hoaxes, and curiosities into witty, eerie, and deeply human stories.

In 1790s London, a sculptor, an actress, and an aristocrat become tangled in art, ambition, and desire. Donoghue uses real figures to build a rich historical triangle set among theatre, politics, and high society.

These contemporary stories focus on taboos, small humiliations, and the awkward turns everyday life can take. Funny and precise, they move between countries and characters while keeping embarrassment at the center.

An Irish flight attendant and a Canadian museum curator fall into a long-distance romance between boomtown Dublin and small-town Ontario. It's a warm, funny love story about migration, timing, and whether two lives can meet in the middle.

When feminist spinster Emily Faithfull is drawn into a sensational 1860s divorce case, private loyalties turn public. Donoghue turns Victorian scandal into a fast, intimate novel about friendship, secrecy, and respectability.

A lively, wide-ranging study of stories about desire between women across Western literature. Donoghue traces recurring plots and patterns from medieval texts onward, making scholarship feel readable and sharp.

Five-year-old Jack has never been outside the single room where he lives with Ma. When she reveals there is a world beyond its walls, their bond and their plan for escape drive this intense, unforgettable novel.

Four fact-based stories circle around accident, suicide, crime, and survival. Slim but unsettling, the collection shows Donoghue's gift for turning archival fragments into sharp human drama.

Fourteen stories, each inspired by real documents, follow travelers, runaways, and drifters across North America. Together they form a restless, beautifully shaped book about migration, risk, and reinvention.

In sweltering 1876 San Francisco, burlesque dancer Blanche Beunon watches her friend Jenny Bonnet get shot dead. Hunting for the killer pulls her through the city's underworld and toward painful truths about her own child.

This volume gathers Donoghue's first five stage works, moving from queer history and witch-trial drama to fairy-tale adaptation and small-town comedy. It is a strong introduction to her theatre writing and her taste for women who lived against the grain.

Written for the centenary of the Easter Rising, this volume brings together eight monologues by different Irish writers. Donoghue's piece gives voice to Nurse Elizabeth O'Farrell, who carried the surrender.

In 1859 rural Ireland, nurse Lib Wright is sent to watch a girl said to have lived without food for months. As pilgrims gather, skepticism and belief harden into a tense psychological battle.

Donoghue reshapes her novel for the stage with songs and a more overtly theatrical style, staying close to Jack and Ma's bond. The result is intimate, tense, and driven by imagination as much as fear.

Nine-year-old Sumac lives with six siblings, four parents, and plenty of pets in a wildly busy home. When her grandfather with dementia moves in, the family has to make room for change, patience, and one more complicated kind of love.

Sumac Lottery tries to hold her huge Toronto family together when an ice storm wrecks their holiday plans. With power failures, stranded relatives, and an unexpected guest, chaos becomes a lesson in generosity.

Retired New York professor Noah reluctantly brings his 11-year-old great-nephew Michael to Nice. Their uneasy trip turns into a search through family photos and wartime secrets, and a moving story about kinship across generations.

In a future shaped by climate crisis and extreme birth control, Miriam lives in a society that treats parenthood as selfish. When she starts wanting a child, the story becomes a quiet, unsettling choice between comfort and freedom.

Dublin, 1918. Nurse Julia Power spends three days in a tiny maternity quarantine ward as flu, childbirth, and political unrest close in. A pressure-cooker historical novel about care, exhaustion, and unexpected connection.

Around the year 600, scholar-priest Artt leads old Cormac and young Trian across the sea to found a monastery on a remote island. Their search for holiness becomes a harsh test of faith, power, and survival.

At a Yorkshire boarding school, teenage Anne Lister and Eliza Raine form an intense first love. Donoghue turns a little-known historical relationship into a tender, painful novel about longing, class, and what memory keeps.

On a French train racing toward disaster in 1895, strangers from different classes and countries share a single journey. Donoghue builds a propulsive ensemble thriller out of speed, chance, and the fragility of ordinary plans.