SEPTEMBER 2017 - AudioFile
On a gray February afternoon in Brooklyn in the early part of the twentieth century, an Irish immigrant commits suicide, leaving behind his pregnant wife, Annie. Euan Morton narrates as Annie and her daughter, Sally, become involved with the nuns at the convent of the Little Sisters of the Sick Poor, who offer Annie a job in their laundry. Although some of Morton’s accents are inconsistent, his steady, gentle delivery allows McDermott’s elegant prose to shine. It's a quiet story about love and sacrifice that manages to be extremely moving without becoming sentimental or maudlin. Morton’s performance similarly brims with emotion but never overflows. E.C. © AudioFile 2017, Portland, Maine
From the Publisher
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
“McDermott has extended her range and deepened it, allowing for more darkness, more generous lashings of the spiritual . . . Vivid and arresting . . . Marvelously evocative.” —Mary Gordon, The New York Times Book Review
“Beautifully observed, quietly absorbing . . . This enveloping novel, too, is a tonic, if not a cure.” —Heller McAlpin, NPR
“[T]he precision of a master . . . [A] great novel.” —The Wall Street Journal
“Stunning… McDermott has created a haunting and vivid portrait of an Irish Catholic clan in early 20th century America.” —The Associated Press
“Brilliant… perhaps her finest work to date.” —Michael Magras, The Houston Chronicle
“A remarkable snapshot of early 20th-century Irish-Catholic Brooklyn.” —Entertainment Weekly
“[B]eautifully crafted . . . McDermott illuminates everyday scenes with such precise, unadorned descriptions that the reader feels he or she is there, hidden in the background . . . [Everything] is treated with McDermott’s exquisite language, tinged with her signature wit…. [A] novel to savor and to share.” —Bookpage
“McDermott is a poet of corporeal description . . . it's the way she marries the spirit to the physical world that makes her work transcendent . . . The Ninth Hour is a story with the simple grace of a votive candle in a dark church.” —Sarah Begley, Time
"In this enveloping, emotionally intricate, suspenseful drama, McDermott lures readers into her latest meticulously rendered Irish American enclave. . . Like Alice Munro, McDermott is profoundly observant and mischievously witty, a sensitive and consummate illuminator of the realization of the self, the ravages of illness and loss, and the radiance of generosity. . . McDermott’s extraordinary precision, compassion, and artistry are entrancing and sublime. . . This is one of literary master McDermott’s most exquisite works." —Donna Seaman, Booklist, starred review
“This seamlessly written new work from National Book Award winner McDermott asks how much we owe others, how much we owe ourselves, and, of course, McDermott’s consistent attention to the Catholic faith, how much we owe God . . . In lucid, flowing prose, McDermott weaves her character’ stories to powerful effect. Highly recommended.” —Library Journal, starred review
“McDermott delivers an immense, brilliant novel about the limits of faith, the power of sacrifice, and the cost of forgiveness . . . It’s the thread that follows Sally’s coming of age and eventual lapse of faith that is the most absorbing. Scenes detailing her benevolent encounters . . . are paradoxically grotesque and irresistible . . . McDermott exhibits a keen eye for character." —Publishers Weekly, starred review
“Everything that her readers, the National Book Award committee, and the Pulitzer Prize judges love about McDermott’s stories of Irish-Catholic American life is back.” —Kirkus Reviews, starred review
“The Ninth Hour by Alice McDermott: National Book Award winner McDermott is simply one of the finest living Catholic writers, and her new novel looks to capture the spirit of her previous work: families and cultures strained by the optimism of faith tempered by the suffering of reality. ... A generational novel sure to appeal to longtime McDermott fans, and to bring-in new readers as well.” —The Millions
“Extraordinary . . . Astonishing . . . Compelling . . . Surely there has never been as strong and clear-eyed a novel about kindness as Alice McDermott’s The Ninth Hour . . . McDermott is yet again at the height of her formidable powers. This work of art comes to us at a time when, as much as ever, we need a call to compassion.” —East Hampton Star
“Any good and proper Most-Anticipated-Fiction list of mine will always start with Alice McDermott.” —The Quivering Pen
“McDermott [is] the master of understated storytelling.” —Washington Independent Review of Books
Publishers Weekly Top 10 Literary Fiction Picks for Fall 2017
Excerpted in The New Yorker
PRAISE FOR ALICE MCDERMOTT
“McDermott has the soul of an archaeologist—excavating shards of the daily routine, closely examining the cracks and crevices of the human heart.” —O Magazine
“Exquisite. . . deft. . . filled with so much universal experience, such haunting imagery, such urgent matters of life and death.” —The New York Times
“Packed with complexity and emotion” —The Washington Post
“Filled with subtle insights and abundant empathy and grace.” —USA Today
“Lyrical study of quotidian life. . . McDermott manages to write lyrically in plain language, she is able to find the drama in uninflected experience.” —Los Angeles Times
“With virtuosic concision, McDermott assembles this swirl of seemingly mundane anecdotes into a powerful examination of love, mortality, and ‘the way of all flesh.’” —The New Yorker
"The micropoetry elevates the book from a gently story to a multilayered Our Town-like tale.” —People
“Each slide, each scene, from the ostensibly inconsequential to the clearly momentous, is illuminated with equal care.” —The New York Times Book Review
“The landscape of memory is a chiaroscuro in motion.” —Boston Globe
“That’s the spectacular power of McDermott’s writing: Without ever putting on literary airs, she reveals to us what’s distinct about characters who don’t have the ego or eloquence to make a case for themselves as being anything special.” —Maureen Corrigan, Fresh Air, NPR
“Extraordinary art woven out of ordinary lives.” —The Quivering Pen
“Gripping and resonant. . . In her own way, she achieves as much as the dazzling, muscular ‘hysterical realists.’ For she manages to break all the basic rules of writing—only quietly.” —NPR
“Almost without exception, each moment . . . is so thoroughly mined so that every story, nearly every thought it seems, reveals the true complexity of our lives.” —The Coffin Factory
“[McDermott] is a sublime artist of the quotidian.” —San Francisco Chronicle
“In beautifully understated language and an unerringly nimble free-associative narrative, McDermott weaves such an intimate complex life study that we feel each . . . accumulating loss until they become staggering.” —Elle
Library Journal
04/01/2017
One of the great writers of the Irish American experience, National Book Award winner McDermott offers the story of a young immigrant in early 1900s Brooklyn who has lost his job and is being hectored by his pregnant wife. So he asserts himself the only way he knows how: he turns on his tenement's gas taps. The suicide is never discussed, yet it has an enormous impact on the victim's family and friends for generations. BEA promotion.
SEPTEMBER 2017 - AudioFile
On a gray February afternoon in Brooklyn in the early part of the twentieth century, an Irish immigrant commits suicide, leaving behind his pregnant wife, Annie. Euan Morton narrates as Annie and her daughter, Sally, become involved with the nuns at the convent of the Little Sisters of the Sick Poor, who offer Annie a job in their laundry. Although some of Morton’s accents are inconsistent, his steady, gentle delivery allows McDermott’s elegant prose to shine. It's a quiet story about love and sacrifice that manages to be extremely moving without becoming sentimental or maudlin. Morton’s performance similarly brims with emotion but never overflows. E.C. © AudioFile 2017, Portland, Maine
Kirkus Reviews
★ 2017-06-06
In Brooklyn in the early 20th century, The Little Nursing Sisters of the Sick Poor are intimately involved in the lives of their community.When a depressed young man with a pregnant wife turns on the gas in his apartment and takes his own life, among the first to arrive on the scene is an elderly nun. "It was Sister St. Savior's vocation to enter the homes of strangers, mostly the sick and the elderly, to breeze into their apartments and to sail comfortably through their rooms, to open their linen closets or china cabinets or bureau drawers—to peer into their toilets or the soiled handkerchiefs clutched in their hands." By the time the fatherless baby is born, St. Savior will have been so instrumental in the fate of the young widow that the baby will be her namesake, called Sally for short. Sally will be largely raised in the convent, where her mother has been given a job helping out with laundry. The nuns also find a friend for the new mother—a neighbor with a houseful of babies—then they finagle a baby carriage, and "the two young mothers negotiated the crowded streets like impatient empresses." This desperately needed and highly successful friendship is just the beginning of the benign interference of the Sisters in the private lives and fates of their civilian neighbors. Partly told by a voice from the future who drops tantalizing hints about what's to come—for example, a marriage between the occupants of the baby carriages—this novel reveals its ideas about love and morality through the history of three generations, finding them in their kitchens, sickbeds, train compartments, love nests, and basement laundry rooms. Everything that her readers, the National Book Award committee, and the Pulitzer Prize judges love about McDermott's (Someone, 2013, etc.) stories of Irish-Catholic American life is back in her eighth novel.
