Frog Music distills and bears witness to her encyclopedic knowledge of the original story, its setting, and the culture of the era. in 18th-century literature and told the Economist that “like any writer of historical fiction, I go by the principle of digging up one hundred times more than I will actually use on the page.” For 15 years, Donoghue plumbed primary source material, including newspaper articles, city records, the federal census, and ships’ passenger lists. Intrigued, Donoghue researched the unsolved crime, generated her own hypothesis, and wrote this novel. One night in 1876, someone, peeping through the window, shot and killed Bonnet as she prepared for bed. Bonnet made her living as a frog catcher for San Francisco restaurants, and was frequently arrested and jailed for the crime of dressing in men’s clothing. Jenny Bonnet, who the author first encountered in an anthology about eccentric Victorian-era women, fits that bill. “Oddity rings my bell,” Donoghue has said. She passes her new test with Dickensian aplomb. Now, in Frog Music, her eighth novel and one inspired by an actual 19th-century murder, Donoghue takes on the radically different challenge of creating an entire city and culture: the street life, lowlife, and nightlife of San Francisco in 1876.

She made her task even more difficult by selecting a 5-year-old boy, captive in the room, as narrator. Readers of her just prior novel, Room (short-listed for the Man Booker Prize), recall the successful creation of a fictional universe within the confines of one windowless room.

Irish author Emma Donoghue is an audacious, daring writer.

Frog music by emma donoghue