Her brother Tim has returned from the war and the trauma has turned him mute along with other PTSD symptoms (loud noises, crowds).
The story takes place in Ireland in the middle of WWI and the 19-teens flu pandemic, just after the Easter Rising of 1916. While she would have had no way of knowing how absolutely timely this story would be, she has produced something that mirrors our current reality to the letter and makes it very, very personal.
The "fourth wall" of fiction is broken here for readers: The pandemic spreads out beyond the pages of Donoghue's novel into whatever rooms we are quarantined in.In the Afterword of this novel Emma Donoghue explains that she turned in her final edits for this novel just before COVID-19 was declared a pandemic. 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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