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.
