The Ninth Hour

A magnificent new novel from one of America’s finest writers - Alice McDermott - 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.

"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."  -  Kirkus Reviews

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 - all rendered with extraordinary sympathy and McDermott’s trademark lucidity and intelligence.

"By immersing readers in such homely details, The Ninth Hour, like Colm Toíbín's Brooklyn, evokes a narrowly confined, simpler, largely bygone world. But McDermott also addresses big, universal questions — about what constitutes a good life, and about how to live with the knowledge of "that stillness, that inconsequence, that feral smell of death."  -  Heller McAlpin, NPR

Alice McDermott’s The Ninth Hour is a crowning achievement by one of the premiere writers at work in America today.