The unabridged audiobook read by Emma Lowe won an AudioFile Earphones award.Ī personal note: I began this novel in October 2018, inspired by the centenary of the Great Flu of 1918-19, and I delivered the final draft to my publishers in March 2020, two days before COVID-19 was declared a pandemic. The Pull of the Stars was a Richard and Judy Book Club pick, a Barnes & Noble Book Club choice, a Reader's Digest Book Club Pick and an Australian Women's Weekly Book Club Pick as well as an Oprah Magazine Best Book of Summer 2020 and a Guardian, Telegraph, NPR, CBC, Globe and Mail, Cosmopolitan and Chapters Indigo Best Book of 2020. It was shortlisted for the Easons Irish Novel of the Year, the Trillium Book Award, the Stonewall Book Awards Barbara Gittings Literature Award, a Goodreads Choice Award for historical fiction, and longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize for Canadian fiction and the Polari Prize. On publication it became a #1 bestseller in Ireland and Canada - staying on Canadian bestseller lists for eight months - and made the New York Times list as well as the Sunday Times list (UK) as well. The Pull of the Stars is Donoghue’s thirteenth novel (and seventeenth book of fiction). With tireless tenderness and humanity, carers and mothers alike somehow do their impossible work. They lose patients to this baffling pandemic, but they also shepherd new life into a fearful world. In the darkness and intensity of this tiny ward, over three days, these women change each other’s lives in unexpected ways. 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 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.

A small world of work, risk, death and unlooked-for love. The Pull of the Stars (New York: Little Brown Toronto: HarperCollins Canada London: Picador, 2020).ĭublin, 1918: three days in a maternity ward at the height of the Great Flu.

The pull of the stars book