The Ninth Hour

A magnificent new novel from one of America's finest writers-a powerfully affecting story spanning the twentieth century of a widow and her daughter and the nuns who serve their Irish-American community in Brooklyn.

Informationen zum Autor Alice McDermott is the author of nine novels, all published by FSG, including Charming Billy , winner of the National Book Award, and That Night , At Weddings and Wakes , and After This , which were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize. She is also the author of the essay collection What About the Baby?: Some Thoughts on the Art of Fiction . Her stories and essays have appeared in The New York Times , The Washington Post , The New Yorker , Harper s Magazine , and other publications. She lives outside Washington, DC. Klappentext From National Book Award-winner and Pulitzer Prize Finalist Alice McDermott, The Ninth Hour is the critically-acclaimed "haunting and vivid portrait of an Irish Catholic clan in early twentieth century America" ( The Associated Press ). One of TIME Magazine's Top Ten Novels of the Year A 2017 Kirkus Prize Finalist A New York Times Book Review Notable Book On a dim winter afternoon, a young Irish immigrant opens a gas tap in his Brooklyn tenement. He is determined to prove-to the subway bosses who have recently fired him, to his pregnant wife-that "the hours of his life . . . belonged to himself alone." In the aftermath of the fire that follows, Sister St. Saviour, an aging nun, a Little Nursing Sister of the Sick Poor, appears, unbidden, to direct the way forward for his widow and his unborn child. In Catholic Brooklyn in the early part of the twentieth century, decorum, superstition, and shame collude to erase the man's brief existence, and yet his suicide, though never spoken of, reverberates through many lives-testing the limits and the demands of love and sacrifice, of forgiveness and forgetfulness, even through multiple generations. Rendered with remarkable delicacy, heart, and intelligence, Alice McDermott's The Ninth Hour is a crowning achievement of one of the finest American writers at work today. ...

Autorentext

Alice McDermott is the author of nine novels, all published by FSG, including Charming Billy, winner of the National Book Award, and That Night, At Weddings and Wakes, and After This, which were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize. She is also the author of the essay collection What About the Baby?: Some Thoughts on the Art of Fiction. Her stories and essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Yorker, Harper s Magazine, and other publications. She lives outside Washington, DC.

Klappentext

From National Book Award-winner and Pulitzer Prize Finalist Alice McDermott, The Ninth Hour is the critically-acclaimed "haunting and vivid portrait of an Irish Catholic clan in early twentieth century America" (The Associated Press).

One of TIME Magazine's Top Ten Novels of the Year
**A 2017 Kirkus Prize Finalist
A New York Times Book Review Notable Book
**
On a dim winter afternoon, a young Irish immigrant opens a gas tap in his Brooklyn tenement. He is determined to prove-to the subway bosses who have recently fired him, to his pregnant wife-that "the hours of his life . . . belonged to himself alone." In the aftermath of the fire that follows, Sister St. Saviour, an aging nun, a Little Nursing Sister of the Sick Poor, appears, unbidden, to direct the way forward for his widow and his unborn child.

In Catholic Brooklyn in the early part of the twentieth century, decorum, superstition, and shame collude to erase the man's brief existence, and yet his suicide, though never spoken of, reverberates through many lives-testing the limits and the demands of love and sacrifice, of forgiveness and forgetfulness, even through multiple generations. Rendered with remarkable delicacy, heart, and intelligence, Alice McDermott's The Ninth Hour is a crowning achievement of one of the finest American writers at work today.