The Pull of the Stars

by Emma Donoghue

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780316499040
Publisher:	Little, Brown and Company
Publication date:	07/21/2020
Sold by:	Hachette Digital, Inc.
Format:	eBook
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Born in Dublin in 1969, Emma Donoghue is an Irish emigrant twice over: she spent eight years in Cambridge doing a PhD in eighteenth-century literature before moving to London, Ontario, where she lives with her partner and their two children. She also migrates between genres, writing literary history, biography, stage and radio plays as well as fairy tales and short stories. She is best known for her novels, which range from the historical (Slammerkin, Life Mask, Landing, The Sealed Letter) to the contemporary (Stir-Fry, Hood, Landing). Her international bestseller Room was a New York Times Best Book of 2010 and was a finalist for the Man Booker, Commonwealth, and Orange Prizes. For more information, visit www.emmadonoghue.com.

Hometown:

London, England and Ontario, Canada

Date of Birth:

October 24, 1969

Place of Birth:

Dublin, Ireland

Education:

B.A. in English and French, University College Dublin, 1990; Ph.D. in English, University of Cambridge, 1998

Website:

http://www.emmadonoghue.com

Editorial Reviews

05/25/2020

Donoghue’s searing tale (after Akin) takes readers to a Dublin beleaguered by wartime shortages and ravaged by a lethal new strain of influenza. On Halloween in 1918, nurse Julia Powers, single and ambivalent about marriage, is about to turn 30. When Julia’s supervisor gets the flu, Julia is left alone serving a ward of high-risk pregnant influenza patients. Kathleen Lynn (the story’s only historical figure), an activist involved with the radical Sinn Féin party, supplements Julia’s own knowledge of obstetrics, and volunteer Bridey Sweeney arrives to help with the backbreaking work. Julia feels a powerful draw to the smart and willing Bridey, whose optimism belies her impoverished upbringing in a brutal charity orphanage. As they cope with the ward’s unceasing cycle of birth and death, their closeness challenges Julia’s sense of herself and her life. While the novel’s characters and plot feel thinner than the best of the author’s remarkable oeuvre, her blunt prose and detailed, painstakingly researched medical descriptions do full justice to the reality of the pandemic and the poverty that helps fuel it. Donoghue’s evocation of the 1918 flu, and the valor it demands of health-care workers, will stay with readers. (July)

Publishers Weekly

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

"Darkly compelling, illuminated by the light of compassion and tenderness: Donoghue's best novel since Room."—Kirkus Reviews


"Donoghue offers vivid characters and a gripping portrait of a world beset by a pandemic and political uncertainty. A fascinating read in these difficult times."—Booklist


"Searing . . . Donoghue's evocation of the 1918 flu, and the valor it demands of health-care workers, will stay with readers."—Publishers Weekly

From the Publisher

06/19/2020

Set in Dublin during the 1918 pandemic, this latest from Donoghue (Akin) follows nurse Julia Power over the course of three days at a Dublin maternity ward, where patients have contracted the dreaded flu. Among a crew perpetually short-staffed and overworked, Julia is not excited when new volunteer Bridie Sweeney is thrust onto her ward. But Bridie proves a quick study, and the chemistry between the two women supports them through three difficult births: Delia, Mary, and Honor, each more graphically detailed than the last. Looming over the combined trauma of the pandemic and world war is Julia's 30th birthday, which her shell-shocked brother Tim attempts to honor as best he can. Layered within all these story lines is the rumor that Dr. Kathleen Lynn, whom Julia depends on, is wanted for rebel activity. The question becomes, should Julia focus solely on medicine and ignore everyone else's loyalties, or should she follow her heart? VERDICT This female-centric story is a cross between Susan Meissner's As Bright as Heaven and Anita Diamant's The Red Tent, with a caveat: those wary of detailed medical scenes should avoid.—Tina Panik, Avon Free P.L., CT

Library Journal

★ 2020-05-18
A nurse in a Dublin hospital battles the ordinary hazards of childbirth and the extraordinary dangers of the 1918 flu.

Donoghue began writing this novel during the 1918 pandemic’s centennial year, before COVID-19 gave it the grim contemporary relevance echoing through her text: signs warning, “IF IN DOUBT, DON’T STIR OUT,” an overwhelmed hospital bedding patients on the floor, stores running out of disinfectant. These details provide a thrumming background noise to the central drama of women’s lives brought into hard focus by pregnancy and birth. Julia Power works in Maternity/Fever, a supply room converted to handle pregnant women infected with the flu. The disease makes labor and delivery even more high risk than normal. On Oct. 31, 1918, Julia arrives to learn that one of her patients died in the night, and over the next two days we see her cope with three harrowing deliveries, only one of which ends well. Donoghue depicts these deliveries in unflinching detail, but the gruesome particulars serve to underscore Julia’s heroic commitment to saving women and their babies in a world that does little for either. Her budding friendship with able new assistant Bridie Sweeney, one of the ill-treated “boarders” at a nearby convent, gives Julia a glimpse of how unwanted and illegitimate children are abused in Catholic Ireland. As far as she’s concerned, the common saying “She doesn’t love him unless she gives him twelve,” referring to children, reveals total indifference to women’s health and their children’s prospects. Donoghue isn’t a showy writer, but her prose sings with blunt poetry, as in the exchange between Julia and Bridie that gives the novel its title. Influenza gets its name from an old Italian belief that it was the influence of the stars that made you sick, Julia explains; Bridie responds, “As if, when it’s your time, your star gives you a yank.” Their relationship forms the emotional core of a story rich in swift, assured sketches of achingly human characters coping as best they can in extreme circumstances.

Darkly compelling, illuminated by the light of compassion and tenderness: Donoghue’s best novel since Room (2010).

Kirkus Reviews