Finalist for National Book Critics Circle Award in Fiction
New York Times Book Review's 100 Notable Books of 2017
The Washington Post's 50 Notable Works of Fiction 2017
The Wall Street Journal's Top 10 Novels of 2017
Time Magazine's Top 10 Novels of 2017
NPR's Best Books of 2017
Kirkus Reviews' Best Fiction & Best Historical Fiction of 2017
Library Journal's Top 10 Novels of 2017
Barnes & Noble's 25 Best Fiction Books of 2017
**
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 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.
