Will I love Haven?

I loved this book because it was one of the most powerful books I read in 2024—and because I wasn’t expecting that at all! Haven is different from everything else I’ve read from Emma Donoghue, which is a very long list at this point.

It’s remarkably clever and subtle, lulling you into thinking it’s just an adventure tale at first. But then it develops into a book that offers such a sharp, intelligent insight into religion as a compelling, corrupting, and blinkering force that it almost hurts to keep reading it.

I loved Emma Donahue’s book Room some years back, but when I picked up this one, Haven, and read a description about three Irish monks in the 7th century, I almost put it back down. Yet it captured me on page one.

Three guys of different ages and very different personalities, driven by different motives, and there they are together throughout the book in an isolated, perilous place, figuring out how to survive.

I was absolutely awed by the research she must have done. It is not a long book (compared to my other two choices), but when I… show more.

My husband (who is a woodturner) convenes a writing group for people who write about craft. I think that group should read this novel, set in a seventh-century monastic community, pretty well on a very large rock (Skellig Michael), for its detailed accounts of living on next to nothing and yet engaging, almost unaware, in meticulous daily craftsmanship. 

That isn’t what the book is about, exactly: it’s mostly about an extreme and obsessively self-denying way of life; it’s about how even a tiny handful of men fall into master and underling roles; it’s about how fear of the unknown leads… show more.