Emma Donoghue

The Pull of the Stars

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The Pull of the Stars
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In Dublin, 1918, a maternity ward at the height of the Great Flu is a small world of work, risk, death, and unlooked-for love, in "Donoghue's best novel since Room" (Kirkus Reviews)

In an Ireland doubly ravaged by war and disease, Nurse Julia Power works at an understaffed hospital in the city center, where expectant mothers who have come down with the terrible new Flu are quarantined together. Into Julia's regimented world step two outsiders -- Doctor Kathleen Lynn, a rumoured Rebel on the run from the police , and a young volunteer helper, Bridie Sweeney.

In the darkness and intensity of this tiny ward, over three days, these women change each other's lives in unexpected ways. They lose patients to this baffling pandemic, but they also shepherd new life into a fearful world. With tireless tenderness and humanity, carers and mothers alike somehow do their impossible work.

In The Pull of the Stars, Emma Donoghue once again finds the light in the darkness in this new classic of hope and survival against all odds.

Author: Emma Donoghue.

Paperback, Published June 2021 256 Pages

Originally published in trade paperback 8th July 2020

“Don’t believe history repeats itself? Read this book…an arresting new page turner of a novel… [The Pull of the Stars] takes place almost entirely in a single room and unfolds at the pace of a thriller.”―Karen Thompson Walker, New York Times
 
“In doing a deep dive into the miseries and terrors of the past, Donoghue presciently anticipated the miseries and terrors of our present. . . . A deft, lyrical and sometimes even cheeky writer . . . she’s given us our first pandemic caregiver novel -- an engrossing and inadvertently topical story about health care workers inside small rooms fighting to preserve life.”―Maureen Corrigan, NPR
 
“Donoghue has fashioned a tale of heroism that reads like a thriller, complete with gripping action sequences, mortal menaces and triumphs all the more exhilarating for being rare and hard-fought… As in her best-known work, the deservedly mega selling Room, Donoghue infuses catastrophic circumstances with an infectious -- but by no means blind -- faith in human compassion, endurance and resilience.”―Wendy Smith, Washington Post

“The Pull of the Stars moves with the quickness of a thriller. . . . Donoghue has pulled off another feat: She wrote a book about a 100-year-old flu that feels completely current, down to the same frustrations and tensions and hopes and dangers. And she did it without even knowing just how relevant it would be -- how well and frighteningly her own reimagining of a historical catastrophe would square with our actual living experience of its modern sequel.”―Carolyn Kellogg, Los Angeles Times

“[Donoghue] conjures up a claustrophobic space -- And into it she brings the world. . . Our collective memory is now a little better anchored, a little more vivid -- thanks to Emma Donoghue.”―Laura Spinney, Wired

“A visceral, harrowing, and revelatory vision of life, death, and love in a time of pandemic. This novel is stunning.”―Emily St. John Mandel, author of The Glass Hotel and Station Eleven

“Captures the reality and valor of frontline women during a global health crisis.”―Parade
 
"Echoes of our current catastrophe abound -- social distancing and confusing messaging among them -- but the heroine copes with so many turn-of-the-century medical horrors that you’ll hardly remember you’re reading a pandemic novel in the first place."―Entertainment Weekly

"With an urgency that brilliantly captures the high-stakes horror and exhilaration of life on a pandemic’s front lines, the Room author centers her latest spine-tingler on a maternity ward nurse charged with keeping new mothers -- and herself -- safe as the 1918 Great Flu sweeps Ireland."―O Magazine

“Captivating . . . outstanding . . . This intense and intimate novel unfolds over three days. But we would gladly spend longer with Julia, watching her in awe as she grapples with life and death in her ‘small square of the sickened, war-weary world.’”―Minneapolis Star-Tribune

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