The Ninth Hour: A Novel [B0618]

2017 HCDJ 1st edition in nice clean condition. Finalist for National Book Critics Circle Award in Fiction * NPR's Best Books of 2017 * Kirkus Reviews' Best Fiction & Best Historical Fiction 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.

From recent Amazon/GoodReads reviews: "Loved it! This is an amazing book if you like generational, character-driven books. Beautifully written prose, yet to the point, within an Irish Catholic family, and the secrets that are kept -most, or all, with good intent."; "I loved the character development in this novel. Being a life-long Catholic myself, I appreciated the humanity with which Alice McDermott portrayed the nursing sisters. I found the story to be realistic, having heard many tales from my own parents of what it was like to live in the early to mid-1900s: restrictions on women's roles, the difficulties in finding meaningful employment, the mystical aura around the Catholic Church and conversely, the reality with which many in the Church actually followed their vocation. The novel comes to a very surprising conclusion."; "I enjoyed this one. Reminiscent of Call the Midwife, but with more dramatic flair."