The Pull of the Stars
The Richard & Judy Book Club Pick and Sunday Times Bestseller
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4.3 • 77 Ratings
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- £0.99
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- £0.99
Publisher Description
The Sunday Times bestseller and Richard & Judy Book Club Pick, from the acclaimed author of Room. The Pull of the Stars is set during three days in a maternity ward at the height of the Great Flu.
'Moving, gripping and dazzlingly written' – Stylist
Dublin, 1918. In a country 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 an unfamiliar 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 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.
In The Pull of the Stars, Emma Donoghue tells an unforgettable and deeply moving story of love and loss.
'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 Station Eleven
'Reads like an episode of Call The Midwife set during a pandemic' – Mail on Sunday
Guardian, Cosmopolitan and Telegraph's 'Books of the Year'
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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 F in 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.
