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