Astray

<p><b>This fascinating, </b><b>fact-inspired fiction </b><b>collection from Emma Donoghue, author of the bestselling <i>Room</i>, is a sequence of fourteen stories about travels to, in, and from North America.</b><br><br>With the turn of each page, the characters that roam across these pages go astray. They are emigrants, runaways, drifters; gold miners and counterfeiters, attorneys and slaves. They cross borders of race, law, sex, and sanity. They travel for love or money, under duress or incognito.<br><br>Donoghue describes the brutal plot hatched by a slave in conjunction with his master's wife to set them both free, and takes us to an early Puritan community in Massachusetts unsettled by an invented sex scandal. <i>Astray</i> also includes 'The Hunt', a shocking confession of one soldier's violent betrayal during the American Revolution, which was shortlisted for the <i>Sunday Times</i> Short Story Award.<br><br><b>These strange, true tales light up four centuries of wanderings, offering a past in scattered pieces, and a surprising and moving history for restless times.</b></p>