Books like Signatories by Emma Donoghue

A five‑year‑old boy and his mother are held in a small room, and the story unfolds through the boy’s perspective, highlighting the harrowing effects of captivity.

The book presents Shakespeare’s *King Henry IV, Part 1* in its original Early Modern English alongside a modern English translation, complemented by commentary on Shakespeare, the Elizabethan theater, and interactive study activities.

In 1850s Irish Midlands, an English nurse and a mysterious fasting girl collide in a tense thriller about faith, health, and a possible murder.

Emma Donoghue’s debut novel follows a French burlesque dancer who, after a murder in 1876 San Francisco, seeks justice for her friend amid heat, smallpox and fierce class tensions.

Emma Donoghue reimagines classic fairy tales in a collection of thirteen interconnected stories, giving timeless characters fresh, wavering voices that explore love, power, and self‑discovery.

In Victorian London, long‑separated friends Emily ‘Fido’ Faithfull and Helen rekindle a bond when Fido steers Helen into an affair with a young army officer, only to risk everything with a mysterious sealed letter.

Astray gathers a cast of diverse emigrants, runaways, and drifters whose lives veer across borders of race, law, and sanity, tracing their journeys from Puritan Massachusetts to the Yukon gold rush, antebellum Louisiana, and 1960s Toronto.

Emma Donoghue’s Hood follows a young woman in Dublin as she copes with the sudden loss of her lesbian partner, exploring love, grief, and the enduring impact of relationships on personal growth.

The science behind the writers’ experience of characters developing their own will and taking objective forms. Many writers have the experience that their characters have evolved their own personalities. They start to tell their own stories, and sometimes they could even rebel against the author’s ideas for them and change the course of the whole plot. That is not all, though. Sometimes, literary characters assume objective appearances which are visible not just to the creators, but also to others and manifesting in the real world. These experiences raise several interesting philosophical and scientific questions. Have the writers unwittingly created quasi-conscious entities by the power of their minds? Can thoughts manifest as something tangible that can be seen, heard, or even touched? How genuine are the contents of the mind? Embodied Imaginations explores these questions, highlighting the results of an investigation on this fascinating topic, stemming from personal anecdotes of many writers. Providing scientific evidence for the existences of these mental constructs, the goal is to collect robust and reliable building blocks that may help to deconstruct perceptions and provide answers to this phenomenon. The book attempts to give modern science a place where spiritual, philosophical and mystical threads can be interwoven. Efforts have been made to corroborate theoretical claims with experimental evidence, contributing to research in cognitive psychology to determine the role of imagination in creating external reality. This book will introduce you to the mysterious and profound part of creative writing that you never knew existed before.

Set in eighteenth‑century London, Adam Donoghue’s Life Mask follows the daring life of Mrs. Damer, the era’s only female sculptor, as she navigates court intrigue, horse‑race innovation, and the ambitions of a Drury Lane actress seeking aristocratic acceptance.

A young London seamstress falls into the world of veteran prostitution amid poverty and danger, navigating misfortunes that put her at the heart of real‑life struggles and crime.

Emma Donoghue unveils the hidden history of lesbian love in Western literature, tracing themes from Chaucer to contemporary crime fiction and revealing how this tradition has shaped cultural narratives.

Denis Donoghue turns his attention to the practice of metaphor and to its lesser cousins, simile, metonym, and synecdoche. Metaphor ("a carrying or bearing across") supposes that an ordinary word could have been used in a statement but hasn't been. Instead, something else, something unexpected, appears. The point of a metaphor is to enrich the reader's experience by bringing different associations to mind. The force of a good metaphor is to give something a different life, a new life. The essential character of metaphor, Donoghue says, is prophetic. Metaphors intend to change the world by changing our sense of it. At the center of Donoghue's study is the idea that metaphor permits the greatest freedom in the use of language because it exempts language from the local duties of reference and denotation. He also addresses the question of whether or not metaphors can ever truly die.--From publisher description.