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Emma Donoghue, author of The Pull of the Stars

In an Ireland doubly ravaged by war and disease in 1918, 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, a rumoured Rebel 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.

Week of July 5, 2021

Paperback releases for the week of July 5th include MIGRATIONS, Charlotte McConaghy's ode to a disappearing world and a breathtaking page-turner about the possibility of hope against all odds; ANXIOUS PEOPLE by Fredrik Backman, a charming, poignant novel about a crime that never took place, a would-be bank robber who disappears into thin air, and eight extremely anxious strangers who find that they have more in common than they ever imagined; Christina Baker Kline's THE EXILES, an ambitious, emotionally resonant work of historical fiction that captures the hardship, oppression, opportunity and hope of a trio of women’s lives --- two English convicts and an orphaned Aboriginal girl --- in 19th-century Australia; and YALE NEEDS WOMEN, Anne Gardiner Perkins' unflinching account of how a group of young women fought against the backward-leaning traditions of a centuries-old institution and created the opportunities that would carry them into the future.