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Cover image for The ninth hour
Format:
Book
Title:
The ninth hour
Other title(s):
9th hour
ISBN:
9780374280147

9781250192745
Edition:
First edition.
Publication:
New York : Farrar, Straus and Giroux, [2017]
Physical Description:
247 pages ; 22 cm
Summary:
A portrait of the Irish-American experience is presented through the story of an Irish immigrant's suicide and how it reverberates through innumerable lives in early twentieth-century Catholic Brooklyn.

On a dim winter afternoon, a young Irish immigrant opens the gas tap 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 belonged to himself alone." In the aftermath of the fire that follows, Sister St. Saviour, an aging nun, a Little Nursing Sister of the Sick Poor, appear, unbidden, to direct the way forward for his widow and his unborn child. In 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, though never spoken of, reverberates through many lives -- testing the limits and the demands of love and sacrifice, of forgiveness and forgetfulness, even across multiple generations. Rendered with remarkable delicacy, heart, and intelligence. Alice McDermott's The Ninth Hour is a crowning achievement of one of the finest American writers at work today. -- From dust jacket.
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