One of the first details that jumped out at me from my research was that Great Flu victims often went weird colours, from lack of oxygen in the blood. It’s been strange not to have that rhythm broken by travels – we had to cancel a trip to see my 91-year-old dad in the States – and I really miss not being able to go out to plays, films and concerts.Ĭan you explain the meaning of the novel’s four sections: Red, Brown, Blue, Black? But I’ve nothing to complain of, because my lockdown experience hasn’t been notably different from my usual writerly life: get up and make stuff up, cook meals, watch good TV. It has been rather surreal, living through two pandemics at once, the historical one in my head and the present one all around me.

We have far less of an excuse for letting bad politicians in certain countries allow it to run wild this time.Īnd yet, it must have felt a little surreal? But also I’m so grateful that scientists know a lot more about what this virus is, how not to catch it and how to treat it than they did back in 1918 when they didn’t even known what a virus was and didn’t have our ventilators, dialysis machines, steroids and antibiotics. Having just written a Great Flu novel, I certainly took COVID-19 seriously from early March and I’m our family’s “have you got your masks?” nag. Did writing and researching it affect your view of our current straits? You finished this book just before the current pandemic hit. The author of multiple novels, including Room and Akin, Donoghue spoke to The Globe and Mail from her home in London, Ont. Set during the 1918 pandemic, as the Great War still rages in Europe, Emma Donoghue’s novel The Pull of the Stars is told from the perspective of a nurse in a Dublin hospital, Julia Power, struggling to help the women in her understaffed, undersupplied maternity/fever ward.

A pull of the stars