Author(s): Emma Donoghue

Novel | LGBTQI+ | Historical

Adding to the already moving, richly told and gripping collection of historical fiction from Emma Donoghue, Learned By Heart is the breathtaking story of two young girls on the margins of life, forging a connection that will last a lifetime. 

In 1805, at boarding school in York, two fourteen-year-olds meet - an orphan heiress, sent from India to England at six, and a gifted troublemaker. Anne Lister would go on to be a gifted diarist, famous the world over. But in the early nineteenth century she met Eliza Raine, someone who would change her life for ever. 

Evocative, captivating and wholly unique, Learned By Heart is the dazzling new novel from acclaimed and bestselling author Emma Donoghue. 

REVIEW:
"Spellbinding...everything about Learned By Heart strikes me as nearly perfect...Donoghue is superb at capturing the unmediated hearts of love-drenched adolescents: raw, vulnerable, disorienting, almost painfully excitable."--Claude Peck, The Star Tribune
Emma Donoghue is among the most fearless contemporary novelists we have: an immensely talented writer who is a great storyteller and, based on her extensive body of work, unafraid of subjects that give her less-courageous peers pause... Learned By Heart is a wrenching love story, both queer and multiracial. --Chris Bohjalian, The Washington Post
"Bold and dazzling...Emma Donoghue has proven herself a masterful storyteller of historical worlds populated with deeply imagined characters. Though the universes she creates seem like they could expand infinitely, she builds small, confined spaces at the center from which grow rich possibilities. This is all especially true of Learned by Heart, a story of risk, love and two young women discovering themselves by way of each other...The language here--of deep friendship and longing, text and subtext--is captivating. Sentences sing, and details shine. Donoghue has a remarkable ability to hold you in a moment, allowing you to see as a character does, knowing the questions each breath contains..."--BookPage
"...unabashedly romantic, dreamlike....a wonderfully rich portrait of boarding school life, both a mirror of the outside world's social hierarchies and a hothouse of complex interactions among girls striving to become women. As always, her narrative is grounded in sharp observation, strong characters, and nice period detail...a treat for her many fans."--Kirkus Reviews
"Donoghue's affection for the savvy, strange Lister is obvious, and the author makes her teenage couple's partnership both deeply serious and wonderfully naive...but the reader knows from the first page that their infatuation won't last, and the novel is ultimately a tender, sad account of first love"--Emma Sarappo, The Atlantic