Room
Room is a 2010 novel by Irish-Canadian author Emma Donoghue. The story is narrated by five-year-old Jack, who has spent his entire life inside Room, the small, locked space where he and his mother, Ma, are held captive by their abductor, known to Jack only as Old Nick. Donoghue was inspired in part by the case of Josef Fritzl, who imprisoned his daughter for 24 years, and in particular by the youngest of the children born in captivity, who first encountered the outside world at age five. Room won the 2010 Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize, the 2010 Hughes & Hughes Irish Novel of the Year, and the 2011 Commonwealth Writers' Prize regional award for Canada and the Caribbean. It was shortlisted for the 2010 Man Booker Prize, the 2010 Governor General's Literary Award for Fiction, and the 2011 Orange Prize for Fiction. The novel was adapted into a 2015 film directed by Lenny Abrahamson and written by Donoghue, starring Brie Larson, who won the Academy Award for Best Actress for her performance.
The five-year-old narrator, born in and raised entirely inside Room, the locked space where he and his mother are held captive; the novel is told through his limited, naive perspective.
The man who abducted Ma from her college campus at nineteen and has held her and Jack captive in a purpose-built backyard shed for seven years.