If you’re a reader who’s had enough of the COVID-19 pandemic, I wouldn’t recommend this read. It’s interesting to observe the parallels between the two realities and how much crossover there is in terms of health messaging and understanding of widespread disease. Get the latest news from in your inbox.📚| Review: From the very first page of The Pull of the Stars, Emma Donoghue pulls the reader back in time over 100 years ago when the world was battling another pandemic, the Spanish Flu of 1918. And though the rather sentimental final two dozen pages make for a somewhat disappointing ending, this is an otherwise deeply compelling and beautifully written historical novel. Her unflinching depictions of childbirth are especially riveting. As the novel progresses, the women’s personal stories - Julia, for example, has a brother at home who has returned from the war shell-shocked and mute - gradually unspool alongside those of their largely impoverished and often malnourished patients.ĭonoghue, who was born and raised in Ireland but now lives in Canada, paints a vivid portrait of a city exhausted by both war and disease, adroitly capturing the difficulties - at once heartbreaking and mundane - that her characters face.
She is joined by a young volunteer helper, Bridie Sweeney, and a physician, named Dr Kathleen Lynn, the latter based on a real-life historical figure, who was active in the Irish republican movement. Taking place almost entirely inside the hospital over three eventful days, the action seems to unfold almost in real time as lives begin and end under the compassionate care of acting ward sister Julia Power.
Two years ago, after reading a newspaper article about the centenary of the 1918 flu pandemic, author Emma Donoghue - most widely known for her 2010 bestseller-turned-film Room - began writing a historical novel set during that period.īy the time she delivered the final draft of the book in March of this year, however, its world of face masks, overloaded hospitals and shuttered businesses had taken on a new and unexpected resonance in the time of COVID-19.ĭonoghue’s publisher thus fast-tracked the book to publication (it was originally due out in 2021), and the result is The Pull of the Stars, set in Dublin near the end of World War I in a busy makeshift ward for pregnant patients who have contracted the potentially deadly strain of flu.
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