TICKETS: $5 general admission tickets on sale 12 pm Tuesday, March 4, 2025
Emma Donoghue will read from her newest novel The Paris Express, followed by an an-stage conversation with bestselling author Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni. The evening will conclude with a book sale and signing. The event is presented as part of the 2024/2025 Inprint Margarett Root Brown Reading Series.
Emma Donoghue, author of 16 novels, is, according to Colum McCann, “one of the great literary ventriloquists of our time. Her imagination is kaleidoscopic.” She is best known for her novels Slammerkin, Life Mask, Stir-Fry, Hood, and Room, which sold more than a million copies worldwide, was a New York Times Best Book of 2010, and was a finalist for the Man Booker and Orange Prizes. Michael Cunningham called Room “that rarest of entities, an entirely original work of art. I mean it as the highest possible praise when I tell you that I can’t compare it to any other book. Suffice to say that it’s potent, darkly beautiful, and revelatory.” She was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay based on the novel and has also written drama for stage and radio. Her nonfiction works include Inseparable: Desire Between Women in Literature, which won the Stonewall Non-Fiction Award from the American Library Association.
Donoghue comes to Houston to share her new book The Paris Express, a propulsive novel set on a train packed with a cast of characters who hail from as far apart as Russia, Ireland, Algeria, Pennsylvania, and Cambodia. Inspired by the 1895 disaster at the Paris Montparnasse train station that was captured in a series of surreal, extraordinary photographs, The Paris Express, according to her publisher, “is an evocative masterpiece that effortlessly captures the politics, glamour, chaos, and speed that marked the end of the 19th century.”
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni is an award-winning writer, activist, and professor of Creative Writing at University of Houston, and the author of 21 books such as Mistress of Spices, Sister of My Heart, Palace of Illusions, The Forest of Enchantments, and The Last Queen. Her newest novel, Independence, depicts the lives of three sisters during India’s freedom struggle.
