Paperback: 291 pages
Genre: Literary Fiction
Publisher: Picador 2020
Source: Tywyn Public Library
First Sentences: Still hours of dark to go when I left the house the morning. I cycled through reeking Dublin streets that were slick with rain.
Favourite Quote: “The human race settles on terms with every plague in the end, the doctor told her. Or a stalemate, at the least. We somehow muddle along, sharing the earth with each new form of life.”
Review Quote: The Pull of the Stars has a fever dream-like quality . . . about as moving and absorbing as it gets ― Evening Standard
Main Characters: Julia Power, Bridie Sweeney, Kathleen Lynn,
Setting: Dublin 1918
My Opinion: Emma Donoghue writes stories that although likely to upset me keep me riveted to the page. This time ‘The Pull of the Stars’ is a thought provoking read set in a Pandemic World. Not the most recent one, Covid 19, but one over one hundred years ago during WWI, ‘The Great Flu’. The similarities are obvious but coincidental as the author completed writing this in 2018, before any of us realised what was heading our way.
The horrors of childbirth, mother and baby homes, the plight of orphans and a pandemic set in war torn Dublin in 1918. The story takes place over just three days as Nurse Power and her colleagues work, with everything against them. The setting is mainly in a small isolation ward, in the Maternity Unit of a Dublin Hospital, where expectant mothers are battling the flu. The author explains in notes at the end of the novel that although the novel is fiction it is ‘fiction pinned together with facts’ The protagonists are all fictional with the exception of Dr Kathleen Lynn, an actual activist within Sinn Fein.
In conclusion this is a very compelling and descriptive read, at times rather sickening, maybe too much so for some. You have been warned, otherwise highly recommended.
Links to Previous Reviews: Room The Wonder
Précis Courtesy of Goodreads:
Dublin, 1918: three days in a maternity ward at the height of the great flu. A small world of work, risk, death and unlooked-for love, by the bestselling author of The Wonder and Room.
In an Ireland doubly ravaged by war and disease, Nurse Julia Power works at an understaffed hospital in the city centre, 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, 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, caregivers 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 Profile:
© Una Roulston 2021.
Born in Dublin, Ireland, in October 1969, she is the youngest of eight children of Frances and Denis Donoghue (the literary critic). She attended Catholic convent schools in Dublin, apart from one eye-opening year in New York at the age of ten. In 1990 she earned a first-class honours BA in English and French from University College Dublin (unfortunately, without learning to actually speak French). She moved to England, and in 1997 received her PhD (on the concept of friendship between men and women in eighteenth-century English fiction) from the University of Cambridge. From the age of 23, she has earned her living as a writer. After years of commuting between England, Ireland, and Canada, in 1998 she settled in London, Ontario, where she lives with Chris Roulston and their son Finn and daughter Una.
Photograph, Trailer and Biographical Information courtesy of the following sites.
Emma Donoghue - Official Website Twitter Profile. Facebook Profile
