It has been optioned by Monumental Pictures, with Donoghue writing the screenplay.Ī personal note: I’ve been wanting to write a novel about the murder of Jenny Bonnet since back in the late 1990s. It was a Finalist in the 2015 Bisexual Book Award for Fiction, and an Honor Book in Literature (Stonewall Book Awards 2015). This is Donoghue's eighth novel and twelfth book of fiction, an instant bestseller in Canada, Ireland, and a New York Times Bestseller. Full of songs that migrated across the world, Emma Donoghue’s lyrical tale of love and bloodshed among lowlifes captures the pulse of a boom town like no other. In thrilling, cinematic style, Frog Music digs up a long-forgotten, never-solved crime. It’s the secret life of Jenny herself, a notorious character who breaks the law every morning by getting dressed: a charmer as slippery as the frogs she hunts. The story Blanche struggles to piece together is one of free-love bohemians, desperate paupers and arrogant millionaires of jealous men, icy women and damaged children. Over the next three days, she will risk everything to bring Jenny’s murderer to justice – if he doesn’t track her down first. The survivor, her friend Blanche Beunon, is a French burlesque dancer. Through the window of a railroad saloon, a young woman called Jenny Bonnet is shot dead.

Summer of 1876: San Francisco is in the fierce grip of a record-breaking heatwave and a smallpox epidemic.

Novel frog music