The Pull of the Stars: A Novel

"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."