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.
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