Alice McDermott

Harvard Book Store welcomes award-winning novelist and Johns Hopkins University professor ALICE MCDERMOTT—author of Pulitzer Prize finalists That Night, At Weddings and Wakes, and After This—for a discussion of her latest novel, The Ninth Hour. Alice will be joined in conversation by fellow novelist MARGOT LIVESEY, author of, most recently, The Flight of Gemma Hardy and Mercury.

About 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 the gas taps 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 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.

Praise

"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

“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)

“Stunning. . . McDermott has created a haunting and vivid portrait of an Irish Catholic clan in early 20th century America.” ―The Associated Press