![]() ![]() Over the course of three days, the two save some of their charges, lose others, and become much closer than Julia had thought possible.ĭonoghue began writing the novel in 2018, inspired by centenary remembrances of the flu. ![]() She’s assisted by a young, ignorant, but surprisingly competent volunteer named Bridie. Julia works in a maternity ward in Dublin her matron has contracted the flu herself, and the novel takes place over three days in which Julia finds herself unexpectedly in charge. But the novel also offers some hope, for Julia and for us, that a broken world can perhaps be put together better, at least in small ways. “Dublin was a great mouth holed with missing teeth,” she thinks. The book is claustrophobic, bleak and more than a little apocalyptic the narrator, nurse Julia Power, looks around a city clogged with phlegm and bodies and death and shuttered businesses. The milieu Donoghue depicts has unsettling parallels with our own crisis. Her new book, The Pull of the Stars, is set in a maternity ward in Dublin during the 1918 flu pandemic. “The whole novel was always tending towards death,” Irish-Canadian writer Emma Donoghue says matter-of-factly. ![]()
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