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The Ninth Hour
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Description
From the National Book Award-winning author comes a luminous, deeply humane novel about three generations of an Irish immigrant family in 1940s and 1950s Brooklyn – for fans of Anne Tyler, Anne Enright and Colm Tóibín
On a gloomy day in February, Jim sends his wife Annie out to do the shopping before dark falls. He seals their meagre apartment, unhooks the gas tube inside the oven, and inhales.
Sister St. Saviour, a Little Nursing Sister of the Sick Poor, catches the scent of fire doused with water and hurries to the scene: firemen, a gathered crowd and a distraught young widow, who is with child. Moved by Annie's plight, the kindly nun finds her work in the convent's laundry, and Annie's baby daughter grows up amidst the crank of the wringer, the hiss of the iron, the reminiscences of Sister Illuminata and the games of Sister Jeanne. Yet what will become of this convent child? Will Sally join the women who raised her in their unending efforts to alleviate Brooklyn's poverty and sickness?
Tracing three generations of an Irish immigrant family, The Ninth Hour tells, in prose of startling radiance and piercing precision, a story that is both individual and universal in its understanding of the human condition. Meditating on fairness, faith, sacrifice, duty and love, it illuminates, with the depth and sensitivity for which Alice McDermott is known, the bonds that unite or divide us.
Product details
| Published | 01 Oct 2017 |
|---|---|
| Format | Paperback |
| Edition | 1st |
| Extent | 256 |
| ISBN | 9781408854617 |
| Imprint | Bloomsbury Publishing |
| Dimensions | 216 x 135 mm |
| Publisher | Bloomsbury Publishing |
About the contributors
Reviews
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McDermott's highly crafted writing – her poised sentences, finely wrought imagery, intricate structuring and emotionally laden detail – is not just clever, but poignant
Sunday Times
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Prose that can feel almost physically radiant … Any emotional turn brings a chance in light, often imbued with a sense of grace ... McDermott is an extraordinary writer
Sunday Telegraph
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Alice McDermott deserves to be far better known in the UK … In McDermott's stripped-down prose, details as commonplace as a vase of fading lilacs speak volumes, making for a complex portrait that's both particular and universal
Daily Mail
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Her wisdom, gently hewn out of the stuff of every day, shines through … Here is the simple but priceless gift of seeing the beauty of things and knowing that even through pain and loss that beauty will abide and indeed glow brighter the longer we look
The Times
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It is easy to fall in love with Alice McDermott's prose. Her endearing details and graceful sentences value the ordinary confusions of day-to-day lives'
Times Literary Supplement
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Her sentences know themselves so beautifully: what each has to deliver and how best to do it, within a modicum of space, with minimal fuss
New York Times



















