We are excited to announce that acclaimed author Emma Donoghue—renowned for Room, The Pull of the Stars, The Wonder, Akin, and Frog Music—will join us to celebrate the 20th anniversary of One Book, One Brant!

Don’t miss this unforgettable opportunity to hear from one of today’s most celebrated authors!

As part of this special event, Emma will debut her highly anticipated new book, The Paris Express.

The Pull of the Stars *Canada Reads 2025 Longlist

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. In an Ireland doubly ravaged by war and disease, Nurse Julia Power works at an understaffed hospital in the city centre, where expectant mothers who have come down with the terrible new flu are quarantined. 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.

The Pull of the Stars is Donoghue’s thirteenth novel (and seventeenth book of fiction). On publication it became a #1 bestseller in Ireland and Canada - staying on Canadian bestseller lists for eight months - and made the New York Times list as well as the Sunday Times list (UK) as well. It was shortlisted for the Easons Irish Novel of the Year, the Trillium Book Award, the Stonewall Book Awards Barbara Gittings Literature Award, a Goodreads Choice Award for historical fiction, and longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize for Canadian fiction and the Polari Prize. The Pull of the Stars was a Richard and Judy Book Club pick, a Barnes & Noble Book Club choice, a Reader's Digest Book Club Pick and an Australian Women's Weekly Book Club Pick as well as an Oprah Magazine Best Book of Summer 2020 and a Guardian, Telegraph, NPR, CBC, Globe and Mail, Cosmopolitan and Chapters Indigo Best Book of 2020. The unabridged audiobook read by Emma Lowe won an AudioFile Earphones award.

Donoghue's theatrical adaptation of The Pull of the Stars premiered at Dublin's Gate Theatre in April-May 2024.

The Paris Express 

“Emma Donoghue, the “soul-stirring” (Oprah Daily) nationally bestselling author of Room, returns with a sweeping historical novel about an infamous 1895 disaster at the Paris Montparnasse train station.

Based on an 1895 disaster that went down in history when it was captured in a series of surreal, extraordinary photographs, The Paris Express is a propulsive novel set on a train packed with a fascinating cast of characters who hail from as close as Brittany and as far as Russia, Ireland, Algeria, Pennsylvania, and Cambodia. Members of parliament hurry back to Paris to vote; a medical student suspects a girl may be dying; a secretary tries to convince her boss of the potential of moving pictures; two of the train’s crew build a life away from their wives; a young anarchist makes a terrifying plan, and much more.

From an author whose “writing is superb alchemy” (Audrey Niffenegger, New York Times bestselling author), The Paris Express is an evocative masterpiece that effortlessly captures the politics, glamour, chaos, and speed that marked the end of the 19th century.”

Register today to secure your spot at our OBOB 2025 author event!

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