Emma Donoghue’s Featured Book
The Pull of the Stars
Dublin, 1918: three days in a maternity ward at the height of the Great Flu. A small world of work, risk, death and unlooked-for love, by the bestselling author of The Wonder and ROOM.
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. 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 the darkness and intensity of this tiny ward, over three days, these women change each other’s lives in unexpected ways. They lose patients to this baffling pandemic, but they also shepherd new life into a fearful world. With tireless tenderness and humanity, carers and mothers alike somehow do their impossible work.
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.
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Owl’s Nest Books | Shelf Life Books
Emma Donoghue’s Recommended Book
It was the first novel I read that made the revolutionary Irish struggle interesting to me, I suddenly realized it was the rage of the poor for wanting a better world, it wasn’t green versus orange, Irish versus British. I got to do an event with him the other day. I got to say this novel is because of you. You don’t know what you’re doing when you write a novel. Somebody in many decades will write another novel provoked by yours, you know, books go viral.
A Star Called Henry by Roddy Doyle
An historical novel like none before it, A Star Called Henry marks a new chapter in Booker Prize-winner Roddy Doyle’s writing. It is a vastly more ambitious book than any he has previously written. A subversive look behind the legends of Irish republicanism, at its centre a passionate love story, this new novel is a triumphant work of fiction.
Born in the slums of Dublin in 1902, his father a one-legged whorehouse bouncer and settler of scores, Henry Smart has to grow up fast. By the time he can walk he’s out robbing, begging, charming, often cold, always hungry, but a prince of the streets. At fourteen, already six foot two, Henry’s in the General Post Office on Easter Monday 1916, a soldier in the Irish Citizen Army, fighting for freedom. A year later he’s ready to die for Ireland again, a rebel, a Fenian, and, soon, a killer. With his father’s wooden leg as his weapon, Henry becomes a republican legend – one of Michael Collins’ boys, a cop killer, an assassin on a stolen bike, a lover.
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