These women underpin everything that happens to our protagonists. This is a book not about men and war but about two mothers, one serving time for drugs, another embroiled in Nazi espionage, both of whom do what they must to protect their families. The sharpest observations, like all good mysteries, are hidden away – though they may be hidden a bit too far down.

What starts as a trip down memory lane turns into a mystery that teaches us about the complicated nature of past and present heroism. Noah’s grandfather was a humanist photographer in the mould of Henri Cartier-Bresson among his mother’s things, Noah finds some photographs of Nice that suggest a shameful family secret. It is the characters of the past that feel most alive. Irish writer Emma Donoghue with her book Room, which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize (Photo: Carl Court/AFP/Getty) “The child was the strangest combination of ignorant and worldly.” It feels odd for Donoghue, who tends to needle out overlooked perspectives, to have chosen this well-worn odd couple framework, and the characters feel more like convenient outlooks than flesh and blood. Noah is initially appalled by Michael but his admiration grows. Think About a Boy, but with sun-drenched terraces and oysters. Noah is an intellectual who persists in explaining French signs and the anatomy of snails. Michael is a sweary lout, obsessed with his Air Jordans and farting. Unwilling to delay the trip and unable to wriggle out of this unexpected obligation (Michael’s father is dead and his mother is in prison), Noah takes him along. His mother mysteriously stayed on for two years.Įmma Donoghue on the ‘shock’ of parenthood that inspired her novel Akin Noé, as he was once known, lived in Nice with his mother until he was packed off to New York, aged four, to escape the Nazis. Noah Selvaggio, 79, childless and stumbling with elegant boredom towards the grave following the death of both his sister and his wife, is lumbered with the care of insolent Michael just as he is about to leave his Upper West Side apartment for a long-awaited trip to the South of France. Yet the two share similar concerns: how we build families, the limitations – and joys – of skewed perspective.

Emma donoghue akin