The Pull of the Stars
Emma Donoghue, 2020
Little, Brown & Company
304 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780316499019
Summary
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 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 outsiderz—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. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—October 24, 1969
• Where—Dublin, Ireland
• Education—B.A., University College Dublin; Ph.D., Cambridge University
• Awards—Irish Book Award
• Currently—lives in London, Ontario, Canada
Emma Donoghue was born in Dublin, Ireland, the youngest of eight children. She is the daughter of Frances (nee Rutledge) and academic and literary critic Denis Donoghue. Other than her tenth year, which she refers to as "eye-opening" while living in New York, Donoghue attended Catholic convent schools throughout her early years.
She earned a first-class honours BA from the University College Dublin in English and French (though she admits to never having mastered spoken French). Donoghue went on receive her PhD in English from Girton College at Cambridge University. Her thesis was on the concept of friendship between men and women in 18th-century English fiction.
At Cambridge, she met her future life partner Christine Roulston, a Canadian, who is now professor of French and Women's Studies at the University of Western Ontario. They moved permanently to Canada in 1998, and Donoghue became a Canadian citizen in 2004. She lives in London, Ontario, with Roulston and their two children, Finn and Una.
Works
Donoghue has been able to make a living as a writer since she was 23. Doing so enables her to claim that she's never had an "honest job" since she was sacked after a summer as a chambermaid. In 1994, at only 25, she published first novel, Stir Fry, a contemporary coming of age novel about a young Irish woman discovering her sexuality.
Donoghue is perhaps best known for her 2010 novel, Room—its popularity practically made her a household name. Room spent months on bestseller lists and won the Irish Book Award; it was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, the Orange prize, and the (Canadian) Governor General's Award. In 2015, the novel was adapted to film. Donoghue wrote the screenplay, which earned her a nomination for an Academy Award, Golden Globe, and Bafta Award.
Since Room, Donoghue has published seven books, her most recent released in 2020—The Pull of the Stars. (Adapted from the author's website and Wikipedia. Retrieved 9/22/2016.)
Book Reviews
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
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
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
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.
Oprah Magazine
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
[S]earing…. While the novel’s characters and plot feel thinner than the best of the author’s remarkable oeuvre, her blunt prose and… evocation of the 1918 flu, and the valor it demands of health-care workers, will stay with readers.
Publishers Weekly
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
(Starred review) [This is] 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.
Kirkus Reviews
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