Alice McDermott - - The Ninth Hour - - HCDJ

Alice McDermott - - The Ninth Hour - - HCDJ


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.

On a dim winter afternoon, a young Irish immigrant opens the gas taps in his Brooklyn tenement. He is determined to prove―to the subway bosses who have recently fired him, to his badgering, pregnant wife―“that the hours of his life belong to himself alone.” In the aftermath of the fire that follows, Sister St. Savior, an aging nun appears, unbidden, to direct the way forward for his widow and his unborn child.

We begin deep inside Catholic Brooklyn, in the early part of the twentieth century. Decorum, superstition, and shame collude to erase the man's brief existence. Yet his suicide, although never spoken of, reverberates through many lives and over the decades testing the limits and the demands of love and sacrifice, of forgiveness and forgetfulness, even through multiple generations.

The characters we meet, from Sally, the unborn baby at the beginning of the novel, who becomes the center of the story to the nuns whose personalities we come to know and love to the neighborhood families with whose lives they are entwined, are all rendered with extraordinary sympathy and McDermott's trademark lucidity and intelligence. Alice McDermott's THE NINTH HOUR is a crowning achievement by one of the premiere writers at work in America today.

247 pages of intrigue to keep you reading page after page.

Hardcover book is in VERY GOOD to GOOD condition with smooth covers, tight binding with dust jacket.

All books are gently read by non-smoker.

The SMRP is $2.6.00 U.S., $37.00 Canadian. The size of the book is 6 inches by 8 1/2 inches and just about an inch thick.

Almost all of my books are USED.

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