SHAPIRO: So I'm imagining you going through the Museum of Natural History Archives taking notes on the colors of the eggs of the various birds.ĭONOGHUE: It's true. She said, look, if you research 18th-century London, you should get like five books out of that. I was once scolded by someone on a panel. And my writing is not very time efficient. SHAPIRO: Were you always interested in birds, or were all of these details things that you had to learn for this book?ĭONOGHUE: They were all things I needed to learn for this book. Great auks and guillemots - they, too, lay one pointed conical egg left carelessly on a ledge.

Once he encountered a shearwater in the daytime, and it spat a stinking oil at him. Any time Trian's delved into the burrow of a puffin or shearwater, he's found only a single egg. Those are the only eggs the monks agree are inedibly foul. Just out of curiosity, he's found that a kittiwake will lay two or three in a tiny nest, whereas a cormorant has a huge nest with as many as four - pale blue. (Reading) Scrutinizing the rock faces below, Trian counts eggs. Will you read one paragraph where you sort of describe this in detail?ĭONOGHUE: Sure, sure. And you go into incredible detail about the birdlife, cormorants, puffins, auks, which are now extinct. SHAPIRO: This island is populated with tens of thousands of birds. And by the end of the boat ride, I had the whole, you know, how the action and the drama might play out and how it might all, of course, go horribly wrong. So I imagined three men - young, middle and old. And I thought, how many of them would there be? Well, I thought I need there to be three of them because of the trinity, because the men who settled on this island were absolutely fixed on their goal of getting away from the world and founding an absolutely pure monastic retreat. You know, I was seized by the question of how they survived. It's a real island that Donoghue actually boated past several years ago.ĮMMA DONOGHUE: Well, by the end of that boat ride, I had the whole thing in my head because I was struck immediately by logistical questions. They land on a place called the Great Skellig. In her new novel, 'Haven,' three Irish monks in the Middle Ages choose to live a life of isolation on a rocky island. Her bestselling novel 'Room' centered on a mother and her son in a forced imprisonment. Emma Donoghue tends to write about people in a tough spot.

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