1918 Flu Inspired Donoghues Pull Of The Stars — A Disquieting Pandemic Novel – NPR
Readers are awaiting novels of the pandemic, and Emma Donoghue just may have stumbled into writing one of the first.
As 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. 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.
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.
In doing a deep dive into the miseries ...