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The Pull Of The Stars: A Novel
by Emma Donoghue
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This is by Emma Donoghue and read by Emma Lowe. I like Emma Donoghue’s novels a lot. This one is a bit different. She had done some research about the 1918 flu epidemic and then, earlier this year, with everything that was going on, she felt that this was the time to publish the story. It’s set around a Dublin maternity ward over just a few days in 1918. Three women from very different classes have to come together to help patients who are having babies at a time when the flu is going on around them. To me, it seemed so much like what is going on in the world now. To have this view of a medical facility, the challenges that the women had—the doctor, the nurse and the aide, the young woman who helps them—and there’s the politics all woven into it. It just resonated with me. It was 100 years ago, but there’s a lot that was very similar. It’s unfortunately staying very relevant. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter And Emma Lowe is brilliant in her narration. She had to have three women from different backgrounds with different types of voices. There’s lots of conversation among them, and among the women patients. It’s very hard to pull off as an audiobook. They do and they have to make sure that they’re getting the right accent in a conversation where it may not say, ‘Bridie said’ or ‘Kathleen said.’ They’ve got to parse it out and these brilliant narrators do that in real time, as they’re reading it. They’ve gone over it before, but they are changing their voices and the performance from character to character as they go.
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"This is by Emma Donoghue and read by Emma Lowe. I like Emma Donoghue’s novels a lot. This one is a bit different. She had done some research about the 1918 flu epidemic and then, earlier this year, with everything that was going on, she felt that this was the time to publish the story. It’s set around a Dublin maternity ward over just a few days in 1918. Three women from very different classes have to come together to help patients who are having babies at a time when the flu is going on around them. To me, it seemed so much like what is going on in the world now. To have this view of a medical facility, the challenges that the women had—the doctor, the nurse and the aide, the young woman who helps them—and there’s the politics all woven into it. It just resonated with me. It was 100 years ago, but there’s a lot that was very similar. It’s unfortunately staying very relevant. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter And Emma Lowe is brilliant in her narration. She had to have three women from different backgrounds with different types of voices. There’s lots of conversation among them, and among the women patients. It’s very hard to pull off as an audiobook. They do and they have to make sure that they’re getting the right accent in a conversation where it may not say, ‘Bridie said’ or ‘Kathleen said.’ They’ve got to parse it out and these brilliant narrators do that in real time, as they’re reading it. They’ve gone over it before, but they are changing their voices and the performance from character to character as they go."
"A pandemic so virulent the world has become “a machine grinding to a halt.” Shops shuttered, coffins stacked and the public admonished to “refrain from shaking hands, laughing, or chatting closely together.” This is Dublin, 1918, at the height of the so-called Spanish Flu pandemic in Emma Donoghue’s eerily timely novel (written before COVID-19). Donoghue, author of the bestselling Room, sets her new book almost entirely in a tiny hospital supply room that’s been converted into a maternity ward for women suffering from the flu. These women, Donoghue writes, have been “worn down to the bone” by poverty and the deadly trauma of far too many pregnancies: “She doesn’t love him unless she gives him twelve,” the ghastly saying goes. At the novel’s center is narrator Julia Power, a nurse-midwife struggling valiantly to save her patients and their babies, with unexpected volunteer Bridie Sweeney at her side. It’s Sweeney who opens Power’s eyes – and ours – to Ireland’s brutal treatment of unwed mothers and their children. A warning: Donoghue’s graphic descriptions of early 20th century childbirth are not for the faint of heart."