Gleason Public Library (Carlisle)

The pull of the stars, a novel, Emma Donoghue

eng

no index present

fiction

The pull of the stars

1147264520

Emma Donoghue

a novel

A novel set in 1918 Dublin offers a three-day look at a maternity ward during the height of the Great Flu pandemicIn 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 fallen sick are quarantined into a separate ward to keep the plague at bay. Into Julia's regimented world step two outsiders, a woman doctor who is a rumored Rebel, and a teenage girl, Bridie, procured by the nuns from their orphanage as an extra set of hands. At first, this Bridie seems unschooled in life, she makes up a bed with only the rubber mat and savors the weak tea and barely edible porridge from the hospital kitchen. But in the intensity of this ward, over three brutal days, Julia and the women come together in unexpected ways