Page 43 - Trillium Book Awards 2021, ONTARIO CREATES

Trillium Book Award
Finalist
Emma Donoghue
The Pull of the Stars
HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.
Dublin, 1918: three days in a maternity ward at the height of the Great Flu. A small world of work, risk, death and unlooked-for love, by the bestselling author of The Wonder and Room.
In an Ireland doubly ravaged by war and disease, Nurse Julia Power works at an understaffed hospital in the city center, where expectant mothers who have come down with the terrible new Flu are quarantined together. Into Julia’s regimented world step two outsiders—Doctor Kathleen Lynn, on the run from the police, and a young volunteer helper, Bridie Sweeney.
In the darkness and intensity of this tiny ward, over three days, these women change each other’s lives in unexpected ways. They lose patients to this baffling pandemic, but they also shepherd new life into a fearful world. With tireless tenderness and humanity, carers and mothers alike somehow do their impossible work.
In The Pull of the Stars, Emma Donoghue once again finds the light in the darkness in this new classic of hope and survival against all odds.
Born in Dublin in 1969, Emma Donoghue is an Irish emigrant twice over: she spent eight years in Cambridge, England, before moving to Canada’s London, Ontario. She is best known for her novels,
which range from the historical (The Wonder, Slammerkin, Life Mask, The Sealed Letter) to the contemporary (Akin, Stir-Fry, Hood, Landing). Her international bestseller Room was a New York Times Best Book of 2010 and was a finalist for the Man Booker, Commonwealth and Orange Prizes; her screen adaptation, directed by Lenny Abrahamson, was nominated for four Academy Awards.
Jury Comment: Eerily relatable and immediately accessible, The Pull of The Stars does things an historical fiction work should not be able to, in no small way due to Donoghue’s immersive storytelling. In precise language and with the cinematic world building we’ve come to expect, Donoghue takes us inside a pandemic in wartime Ireland, where her characters endure an almost impossible state of living. But then she gives us a narrator we can hold on to – one who is as fragile as she is
unbreakable, who brings us along as she finds love and builds family and experiences true wonder, even in the worst of times. Inspiring and beautiful, The Pull of the Stars is a masterpiece of transportive storytelling.
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Photo Credit: Mark Raynes Roberts, 2015