Cover Image

The ninth hour a novel

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 a gas tap in his Br...

Full description

Main Author: McDermott, Alice (Author)
Format: Downloads eBook Books eBook
Language: English
Published: 2017.
Subjects:
Immigrants > New York (State) > New York > 20th century > Fiction.
Irish Americans > Fiction.
Widows > New York (State) > New York > Fiction.
Nuns > New York (State) > New York > Fiction.
Historical fiction.
Domestic fiction.
Electronic books.
Online Access: Go to Downloadable eBook Here.
Summary: 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 a gas tap 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 . . . 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.
Physical Description: 1 online resource
Format: Requires OverDrive Read (file size: N/A KB) or Adobe Digital Editions (file size: 1379 KB) or Kobo app or compatible Kobo device (file size: N/A KB).
ISBN: 9780374712174
Author Notes: Alice McDermott was born in Brooklyn, New York on June 27, 1953. She received a B.A. from the State University of New York at Oswego in 1975 and an M.A. from the University of New Hampshire in 1978. After graduating college, she got a job reading unsolicited manuscripts for Redbook magazine and did some freelance reading for Esquire. She has taught writing at American University, the University of New Hampshire, and the University of California at San Diego. Currently, she is the Writing Seminars Professor of the Johns Hopkins University Writing Department.

Her short stories and articles have appeared in numerous publications including Ms., Redbook, Mademoiselle, The New Yorker, Seventeen, the New York Times and the Washington Post. She has written several novels including A Bigamist's Daughter, At Weddings and Wakes, Child of My Heart, After This, Someone, and The Ninth Hour. That Night was made into a film starring C. Thomas Howell and Juliette Lewis in 1992. She has won several awards including the National Book Award for fiction in 1998 for Charming Billy, a Whiting Writers Award, and the 2008 Corrington Award for Literature.

(Bowker Author Biography)

Similar Items