Julia Power, who has already had her “dose” and “come through practically unscathed,” is a soon-to-be 30-year-old nurse working in an improvised maternity ward for quarantined mothers. It would be a uniformly grim picture if not for the two protagonists. Businesses are boarded up, hearses line the streets, and those who have yet to be infected shrink away from those who may be. Indeed, it did, and how prescient Donoghue’s novel seems now, with its descriptions of a pandemic that has swept through Dublin during the First World War. Just after I delivered my last draft to my publishers, in March 2020, COVID-19 changed everything.”

“In October 2018, inspired by the centenary of the great flu,” Emma Donoghue tells us in the Author’s Note of her new novel, “I began writing The Pull of the Stars. The 'fourth wall' of fiction is broken here for readers: The pandemic spreads out beyond the pages of Donoghue's novel into whatever rooms we are quarantined in.The Pull of the Stars by Emma Donoghue | Credit: Courtesy Reading The Pull of the Stars now is such a disquieting experience - and certainly a very different one than it would've been had the novel come earlier. In doing a deep dive into the miseries and terrors of the past, Donoghue presciently anticipated the miseries and terrors of our present: the claustrophobia of days spent inside, empty schools and cafes, and the ubiquity of masks, here quaintly described as 'bluntly pointed.

Understandably, her publishers fast-tracked the publication of The Pull of the Stars, which is set in a maternity ward in 1918 in Dublin, a city hollowed out by the flu, World War I and the 1916 Irish Uprising. Donoghue delivered the final draft to her publishers this past March, just as a stunned world was taking in the enormity of the coronavirus crisis. Readers are awaiting novels of the pandemic, and Emma Donoghue just may have stumbled into writing one of the first.Īs Donoghue explains in the author's note to her new novel, The Pull of the Stars, she began writing the story in 2018, inspired by the centenary of the Spanish Flu pandemic.

The pull of the stars book