- Home
- FICTION
- Historical Fiction
- The Ninth Hour
The Ninth Hour
This product is usually dispatched within 2-4 weeks
- Delivery and returns info
-
Flat rate of $10.00 for shipping anywhere in Australia
You must sign in to add this item to your wishlist. Please sign in or create an account
Description
From the National Book Award-winning author comes a luminous, deeply humane novel about three generations of an Irish immigrant family in 1940s and 1950s Brooklyn – for fans of Anne Tyler, Anne Enright and Colm Tóibín
On a gloomy day in February, Jim sends his wife Annie out to do the shopping before dark falls. He seals their meagre apartment, unhooks the gas tube inside the oven, and inhales.
Sister St. Saviour, a Little Nursing Sister of the Sick Poor, catches the scent of fire doused with water and hurries to the scene: firemen, a gathered crowd and a distraught young widow, who is with child. Moved by Annie's plight, the kindly nun finds her work in the convent's laundry, and Annie's baby daughter grows up amidst the crank of the wringer, the hiss of the iron, the reminiscences of Sister Illuminata and the games of Sister Jeanne. Yet what will become of this convent child? Will Sally join the women who raised her in their unending efforts to alleviate Brooklyn's poverty and sickness?
Tracing three generations of an Irish immigrant family, The Ninth Hour tells, in prose of startling radiance and piercing precision, a story that is both individual and universal in its understanding of the human condition. Meditating on fairness, faith, sacrifice, duty and love, it illuminates, with the depth and sensitivity for which Alice McDermott is known, the bonds that unite or divide us.
Product details
| Published | 01 Oct 2017 |
|---|---|
| Format | Paperback |
| Edition | 1st |
| Extent | 256 |
| ISBN | 9781408854617 |
| Imprint | Bloomsbury Publishing |
| Dimensions | 216 x 135 mm |
| Publisher | Bloomsbury Publishing |
About the contributors
Reviews
-
Alongside her marvellous descriptions of unbeautiful bodies is an intense lyricism … McDermott is so attentive to atmospheres, glances, the quietest moments that provoke profound shifts in a character's world ... Her new book unfolds without sentimentality or pity, but with a frankness of gaze that elevates her characters rather than diminishes them. Mercy, it seems, doesn't always take the forms we might imagine
Molly McCloskey, Guardian
-
Beautifully written, heart-wrenching and funny by turns, and offers a deeply vivid and authentic portrayal of Brooklyn long before its hipsters arrived
Sunday Times
-
Dealing in simple lives and small dramas, the prose displays an unerring sense of detail, mood, and emotion. A masterful American writer at her best
Jeffrey Burke, Mail on Sunday
-
From the perfect opening sentence of this latest book by the American Pulitzer Prize finalist, you know you are in safe hands … McDermott depicts with sensuous intensity the texture of lives lived and the intersection of faith and sin in a remarkable novel marked by small, but transformative, acts of grace
Daily Mail
-
She is a poet of corporeal description … It's the way she marries the spirit to the physical world that make her work transcendent. The Ninth Hour is a story with the simple grace of a votive candle in a dark church
Sarah Begley, Time
-
Superb and masterful … Powerful and sublime ... Her sentences burn on the page
Washington Post

























