Hood

Hood is a powerful and moving story of a hidden, secret grief from Emma Donoghue, the author of Room.

Penelope OGrady and Cara Wall are risking disaster when, like teenagers in any intolerant time and place – here, a Dublin convent school in the late 1970s – they fall in love. Yet Cara, the free spirit, and Pen, the stoic, craft a bond so strong it seems as though nothing could sever it: not the bickering, not the secrets, not even Caras infidelities.

But thirteen years on, a car crash kills Cara and rips the lid off Pens world. Pen is still in the closet, teaching at her old school, living under the roof of Caras gentle father, who thinks of her as his daughters friend. How can she survive widowhood without even daring to claim the word? Over the course of one surreal week of bereavement, she is battered by memories that range from the humiliating, to the exalted, to the erotic, to the funny.

It will take Pen all her intelligence and wit to sort through her tumultuous past with Cara, and all the nerve she can muster to start remaking her life.