Excerpt from The Pull of the Stars by Emma Donoghue, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Something else I held against him was that he fancied himself a singer. Goodbye-ee, he crooned lugubriously now, goodbye-ee…

Nichols's nasal, echoey voice joined in on the second line: Wipe the tear, baby dear, from your eye-ee.

I set my teeth. Despite the fact that we nurses had years of training—a theory diploma from the technical school as well as a practical one from the hospital and a third in an area of specialty—the orderlies liked to talk down to us, as if feminine weakness made us need their help. But it always paid to be civil, so I asked, Could two of you possibly bring Anonymous below when you have a moment?

O'Shea told me, Anything for you, Nurse Power.

Groyne reached towards the overflowing brass ashtray, stubbed out his fag, and put it in his breast pocket for later, singing on.

Don't cry-ee, don't sigh-ee,
There's a silver lining in the sky-ee.
Bonsoir, old thing, cheerio, chin chin,
Napoo, toodle-oo, goodbye-ee.

I said, Thanks ever so, gentlemen.

Heading for the stairs, I found I was a little dizzy; I hadn't eaten anything yet today.

Down into the basement, then, not right towards the mortuary but left to the temporary canteen that had been set up off the kitchen. Our ground-floor dining rooms had been commandeered as flu wards, so now staff meals were dished up in a windowless square that smelled of furniture polish, porridge, anxiety.

Even with doctors and nurses having to muddle in together in this ad hoc canteen, there were so few of us still on our feet and reporting for duty that the breakfast queue was short. People leaned against the walls, wolfing down something egg-coloured with an obscure kind of sausage. Roughly half were wearing masks, I noticed, the ones who hadn't had the grippe yet or (like Nurse Cavanagh) who were too rattled to do without the sense of protection offered by that fragile layer of gauze.

Twenty hours' work on four hours' sleep!

That from a girlish voice behind me. I recognised her as one of this year's crop of probies; being new to full-time ward work, probationers lacked our stamina.

They're bedding patients down on the floor now, a doctor grumbled. I call that unhygienic.

His friend said, Better than turning them away, I suppose.

I glanced around, and it struck me that we were a botched lot. Several of these doctors were distinctly elderly, but the hospital needed them to stay on till the end of the war, filling in for younger ones who'd enlisted. I saw doctors and nurses who'd been sent home from the front with some harm done but not enough for a full service pension, so here they were again despite their limps and scars, asthma, migraines, colitis, malarial episodes, or TB; one nurse from Children's Surgical struggled with a chronic conviction that insects were crawling all over her.

I was two from the head of the line now. My stomach rumbled.

Julia!

I smiled at Gladys Horgan, squeezing towards me through the knot of bodies at the food table. We'd been great pals during training almost a decade ago, though we'd seen less of each other once I went into midwifery and she into eye and ear. Some of our class had ended up working in private hospitals or nursing homes; between those who'd left to marry or who'd quit due to painful feet or nerve strain, there weren't many of us still around. Gladys lived in at the hospital with a gang of other nurses, and I lodged with Tim, which was another thing that had divided us, I suppose; when I went off shift, my first thought was always for my brother.

Gladys scolded: Shouldn't you be on leave?

Nixed at the eleventh hour.

Ah, of course it would be. Well, soldier on.

You too, Gladys.

Must rush, she said. Oh, there's instant coffee.

Excerpted from The Pull of the Stars by Emma Donoghue. Copyright © 2020 by Emma Donoghue. Excerpted by permission of Little Brown & Company. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.