In the spirit of Emma Donoghue's international bestseller Room, Captive throws readers into the mind of a woman who wakes to find herself in a terrifying and surreal situation: she's confined to a small grey room and she has no idea why she's there.
Emma has an unremarkable life, a mundane job, and very little contact with her family and friends. Night after night she drinks to forget until one evening she's jolted out of her routine. She wakes up in a concrete room furnished with only a mattress and a ceiling lamp. Emma is seized by terror. She feels real emotion for the first time in a long time. She tries to make sense of what is happening to her, where she is, who has taken her, and why. As the days, weeks, and possibly months pass she develops a routine that helps her survive her circumstances. But just as Emma begins to find comfort in her routine she receives another terrifying jolt and she must adapt to new circumstances. Her mysterious captors subject her to various tests that push her to her limit and make her question everything about herself, including her will to survive.
Captive is a harrowing, suspenseful, and hypnotic debut about honesty and freedom and the importance of living meaningfully and truthfully.
“The Brothers Grimm meets Stephen King.” — La Presse (Quebec)
“Dumont’s sentences are short, syncopated, panting — even suffocating . . . A tour de force.” — Le Devoir (Quebec)
"an exhilarating read…the suspense and physical action is relentless until the bombshell ending" —Metro
"Everything hinges on Dumont’s ability to make you feel Emma’s confusion, panic and anger, and happily…that’s exactly what she does, aided by David Scott Hamilton’s translation." — Montreal Gazette
"short and intense…a book well worth picking up." — National Post
"Captive by Claudine Dumont, translated by David Scott Hamilton, comes with a hell of a twist. It’s a twist so big that you might want to consider stapling the last few pages together in case you accidentally read the equivalent of 'The butler did it.'" — Quebec Reads
"As a study in suspense, Captive is a page-turner, and its diminutive length makes it all the more likely to be devoured in a single sitting. Captive does a masterful job of suggesting that extreme confrontation with a loss of agency can generate provocative questions about the extent to which anyone is ever in control.” — Montreal Review of Books
