I thought of my brother, whom I’d left at home finishing a piece of toast.Īt the tram stop, the pool of electric light was becoming watery as dawn approached. The names painted on were just a few dozen Irishmen out of the tens of thousands lost so far, out of hundreds of thousands who’d enlisted. There was a chipped azure Virgin Mary for good measure and a shelf below overflowing with decaying flowers. I passed an improvised war shrine-a wooden triptych draped with the Union Jack. I ducked away from the masked men who were spraying the gutters and feeding their hose through the grating of gully after gully. I’d have preferred to cycle all the way to the hospital, and it would have brought me there in half the time the tram took, but Matron wouldn’t hear of her nurses turning up in a sweat.Įmerging onto the street, I nearly walked into a disinfection cart.

How would I replace it when its mechanism rusted up?) I let down the side tapes of my skirt and took my rain-soaked bag out of the basket. I left my cycle in the usual alley and clipped the combination lock onto the back wheel. I pedalled faster, past a motor car creeping along to eke out its petrol. A boy in a man’s coat shouted something rude at me. A waft of dung and blood as I passed a lane where livestock were waiting. My short green cape kept off the worst, but my coat sleeves were soon wet through. I cycled through reeking Dublin streets that were slick with rain. STILL HOURS OF DARK to go when I left the house that morning. In The Pull of the Stars, Emma Donoghue once again finds the light in the darkness in this new classic of hope and survival against all odds.

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, a rumoured Rebel 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 center, where expectant mothers who have come down with the terrible new Flu are quarantined together. In Dublin, 1918, a maternity ward at the height of the Great Flu is a small world of work, risk, death, and unlooked-for love, in 'Donoghue's best novel since Room' ( Kirkus Reviews).

Pull of the stars emma donoghue