ROOM by Emma Donaghue, this month’s Readers’ Group selection, is a book that will stay with you long after you’ve turned the last page and make you see the world from a different perspective.

Five-year-old Jack lives with Ma in a locked room, 11ft square, with no windows, just Skylight. Room is the only world Jack has ever known, but as he turns five, Ma begins the ‘unlying’ and reveals to Jack that there is such a place as Outside and that she, too, has a mother and was once a child.

But while Room is a prison to Ma, to Jack it is security – home. The power of Ma’s love has ensured that Jack is unaware, at least consciously, of the truth of their situation, bundling him into Wardrobe after nine at night when the beep beep of Door signals Old Nick’s arrival. Inside Wardrobe, Jack counters his anxiety by counting – the creaks of Bed and his own teeth.

Then Ma comes up with a plan to get them out of Room ...

Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize last year, Room is a remarkable achievement, told as it is entirely from Jack’s point of view.

The necessarily restricted view of that perspective makes the horror of Ma and Jack’s situation far more profound than it would have been told by, say, Ma, or a disembodied narrator – because Jack doesn’t know what the beep beep of Door really means, nor what the creaks of Bed signify.

The screaming game that Ma and he play after lunch most days is nothing more than a game to Jack, and Ma’s flashing on and off of the light in the middle of the night is just one of her idiosyncracies.

Jack knows that the only things that are real are him and Ma and Room, until the ‘unlying’ starts.