The Pull of the Stars

(Little, Brown, $28) Reading Emma Donoghue’s new novel is “such a disquieting experience,” said Maureen Corrigan in NPR.org. Writing about the 1918 flu epidemic, the author of Room “presciently anticipated the miseries and terrors of our present.”

The book’s protagonist, Julia Power, is a nurse midwife in a Dublin hospital who has been put in charge of tending to fluafflicted mothers-to-be in a converted storage room. There, she sees more dying than even the grim norm. “Squeamish readers may blanch at Donoghue’s graphic accounts of childbirth,” said Wendy Smith in The Washington Post. They also might suspect her of stacking the deck when Julia and her orphan assistant are joined by a female doctor who once had participated in a 1916 insurrection against British rule—except that Kathleen Lynn was a real person freed from prison to fight the pandemic. “From these dark materials, Donoghue has fashioned a tale of heroism that reads like a thriller, complete with gripping action sequences, mortal menaces, and triumphs all the more exhilarating for being rare and hard-fought.”