Ma feels sure that Old Nick would rather murder the both of them before letting them go she begins to make a plan for escape. Ma has just learned that Old Nick has been unemployed for six months, and might be about to lose his home to foreclosure. It is now a week after Jack’s fifth birthday. Jack is the product of one of these rapes, which continue regularly.

He is Ma’s captor and rapist of the past seven years, since she was nineteen. When Old Nick visits, Jack is sent to hide in a wardrobe, and is sleeping by the time Old Nick arrives. The only other person Jack has ever seen in his life is Old Nick, who only comes to visit Room at nighttime. Jack’s entire world is this room and his mother. She instigates both physical and mental exercises they keep a healthy diet, limit TV watching time, and maintain strict levels of body and oral hygiene. Ma does the best that she can to keep her son happy and healthy. She is not willing to disappoint him with the life she cannot give him. Jack believes that the only “real” things are those inside the room Ma tells him everything on their TV exists only on the TV. Room is a single-room, standalone outbuilding, with a small kitchen, a bathtub, a wardrobe, bed, and TV set. Room is told from the perspective of a young boy, Jack. This took place in Austria, over the course of twenty-four years, and included a daughter being held captive and raped by her father, eventually bearing seven children. The novel was written after Donohue heard about a now very famous real-life case, the Fritzl case. Noteworthy themes include isolation, freedom, bonds with family, fear, love, and communication. The novel was adapted into a movie in 2015, with the star, Brie Larson, winning an Academy Award for Best Actress. It was also shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2010, and also for the 2010 Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, as well as the 2010 Governor General’s Awards. Room (2010) a novel by Emma Donoghue, an Irish-Canadian author, was considered for the 2011 Orange Prize, and won the 2011 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize regional prize within the Caribbean and Canada.

Room donoghue