“Such hypocrisy, the way the authorities preach hygiene to people forced to subsist like rats in a sack.” Dr Lynn was a real figure, a suffragette, nationalist and activist for social justice who fought in the Easter Rising and was arrested and imprisoned. Babies born in the slums, she says, have less chance of surviving a year than men in the trenches. Julia, whose own background is not very different from her patients’, is sadly inured to social injustice, but a new doctor in the hospital, Kathleen Lynn, never forgets to be angry. The friendship between the young women lifts an otherwise necessarily grim account of suffering and deprivation Patients stay long enough for Julia and the reader to learn to read their bodies and speech as more than symptoms, to recognise that class privilege is no protection from grief, that a half-starved 17-year-old doesn’t “bruise easily” unless someone bruises her, that poverty and overcrowding and malnutrition tell their final tales in hospital beds. Julia is working on the maternity fever ward of a city hospital, which is desperately short-staffed because of war and contagion, caring for pregnant women with severe flu, working beyond her training because there is no one else available. Like The Wonder, The Pull of the Stars is narrated by a nurse, a woman necessarily involved in the defining moments of strangers’ lives, charged with both expertise and kindness, her professionalism and her femininity an unsettling combination for her era. If in doubt, don’t stir out.” Another poster announces that “The government has the situation well in hand,” and “There is no real risk except to the reckless.” Meanwhile, schools and shops are closed, and those forced by necessity on to crowded trams regard each other with a volatile mix of fear and camaraderie.Ī defining strength in Emma Donoghue’s work is narrative voice, and here it is as strong and compelling as Jack in Room and Lib in The Wonder. The novel’s Dublin is certainly uncannily familiar for this year’s readers, plastered with injunctions to “Stay out of public places … See only those persons one needs to see, refrain from shaking hands.

Reading it now offers a particularly eerie version of the time travel of historical fiction one can’t stop thinking that it was written in 2018 for us to read in 2020, based on records from 1918 – dizzying swoops of both time and imagination. T his must be the only book this year whose publication date has moved forward, from autumn to midsummer, and that is because it’s set in a Dublin hospital during the 1918 flu pandemic.

Emma donoghue books in order