Star attraction

In Dublin in 1918, at the height of the Spanish flu pandemic, a hospital maternity ward is transformed into a small world of work, risk, death, and unexpected love, in “Donoghue’s best novel since *Room*” (Kirks Reviews). In an Ireland torn apart by war and disease, nurse Julia Power works in an understaffed hospital in the city center, where expectant mothers with the dreadful new flu are quarantined together. Enter Julia’s hermetic world are two strangers—Dr. Kathleen Lane, a rebel on the run from the police, and a young volunteer named Bridie Sweeney. In the darkness and intensity of this small ward, over the course of three days, these two women transform each other’s lives in unexpected ways. They lose patients to this bewildering pandemic, but they also forge new lives in a terrifying world. With unflagging tenderness and humanity, caregivers and mothers alike somehow manage to accomplish their impossible feat. In The Pull of the Stars, Emma Donoghue once again finds the light in the darkness in this new classic novel about hope and survival against all odds.