MPOV: Astray

My rating: 2/5

Goodreads rating: 3.57/5

Author: Emma Donoghue
Originally published: 2012
Genre: Historical fiction

The fascinating characters that roam across the pages of Emma Donoghue's stories have all gone astray: they are emigrants, runaways, drifters, lovers old and new. They are gold miners and counterfeiters, attorneys and slaves. They cross other borders too: those of race, law, sex, and sanity. They travel for love or money, incognito or under duress.

With rich historical detail, the celebrated author of Room takes us from puritan Massachusetts to revolutionary New Jersey, antebellum Louisiana to the Toronto highway, lighting up four centuries of wanderings that have profound echoes in the present. Astray offers us a surprising and moving history for restless times.

"The Hunt" was short-listed for the 2012 Sunday Times EFG Private Bank Short Story Award.

The above taken from Goodreads.

It's a compilation of short stories inspired from old articles or history that Emma has come across. It may have been written neatly with the accompanying details but I did find it dense a little if not kinda had me in a daze. I've not read her other books yet so I'm unsure if her prose or her story was not my cup of tea. That said, I did like a few of it like The Gift, Vanitas and What Remains.

An interesting phrase:

Nearly never knit a sock

A couple of worthy notes:

Some new words:
Ignorami - an utterly ignorant person
Perfidiousness - it means underhanded, treacherous, deceitful
Caterwaul - a shrill howling or wailing noise
Almshouse - a house founded by charity
Ersatz - not real or genuine
Uxorious - having or showing a great or excessive fondness of one's wife
Obsequies - funeral services
Simulacrum - an image or representation of someone or something
Expiation - the act of making amends or reparation for guilt or wrongdoing, atonement