Haven

Critics Review

• A remarkably engrossing tale

  The Mail on Sunday

• This book kept me up half the night – I was unable to put it down, and read it in one spellbound gulp. It is everything a novel should be: compassionate, unpredictable, and questioning. Haven is Donoghue at her strange, unsettling best.

  Maggie O'Farrell, author of Hamnet

• Brooding, dreamlike . . . it’s in descriptions of the physical world that Donoghue’s prose soars . . . Likewise, among themes that include isolation and devotion, its ecological warnings are its most resonant.

  The Observer

• Quietly beautiful . . . And its subject, of course, is a universal one: we’re all stuck on this rock, trying to keep hold of simple moral truths while quietly losing our minds. As poor young Trian puts it, in one of his darkest moments: “Even this unbearable life is still sweet."

  The Guardian

• Donoghue excels in creating not just a world but a worldview that is far removed from our own . . . this is a bold, thoughtful novel.

  Financial Times

• A beautiful and timely novel about isolation, passion and the conflict between obedience and self-preservation. The island setting and the characters stayed with me long after I finished reading

  Sarah Moss, author of Ghostwall and Summerwater

• Donoghue wrings unlikely psychodrama from such everyday chores of monastic life as copying a manuscript or building a drystone wall. But if that doesn’t grab you, rest assured that the devastating denouement amply repays the reader’s patience — and has a thing or two to say about modern-day moral panics, too

  Daily Mail

• I am already an admirer of Emma Donoghue’s writing and this novel had me in its grasp from the beginning. It was so bleak and brutal about the harshness and fanaticism of the monastic life; I was absolutely convinced by her depiction of scratching a life on the bare island and the power play between the trinity of monks, and their motivations and beliefs. I read it in a couple of sittings with a growing sense of foreboding and desperation to know their fates. A powerful story, brilliantly imagined.

  Clare Chambers, author of Small Pleasures

• Haven creates an eerie, meditative atmosphere that should resonate with anyone willing to think deeply about the blessings and costs of devoting one’s life to a transcendent cause.

  The Washington Post

• In 7th C, Ireland, three men set sail to a bird-thick island to find God. EmmaDonoghue combines pressure-cooker intensity + radical isolation, to stunning effect. What is Divine Grace? Purity of soul? Virtue? Not what they think.

  Margaret Atwood via Twitter

• Sinister, heart-wrenching and beautifully written.

  The Times

• A grim and grisly tale of monastic privation and isolation in seventh-century Ireland . . . [Donoghue] deftly captures the elemental nature of the relationship between her protagonists and the natural world; how it’s both their benefactor and their tormentor, a source of life, but also of death.

  The Daily Telegraph

• What a beautiful, intense, blazing, richly-woven yet spartan and unsparing book this is. I couldn’t put it down. Lyrical and then visceral, appearing at one moment tranquil and another so intense it’s like being bitten and clawed . . . it is both a story about three men of God surviving with almost nothing on an island, and another about dictatorship, isolation, true fraternity, love, the nature of faith and man’s place in the natural world . . . It’s utterly brilliant.

  Rachel Joyce, author of The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry

• Written in an admirably plain and lucid style, Haven is slow but ulitamately moving in its revalation of friendhsip and human decency . . .

  The Times

• A patient, thoughtful novel with much to say about spirituality, hope, and human failure, and about the miracle of mercy.

  Esi Edugyan, Booker-shortlisted author of Washington Black

• A vivid fictional recreation of the first settlers on the Skellig rocks in the sixth century – the most westerly sacred site in Europe. The descriptions of Atlantic sea life are unforgettable

  Richard Kearney, author of The Wake of Imagination

• Haven is a gentle book, a fascinating exploration of human nature and an immensely enjoyable read.

  RTÉ