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.
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