New Releases by Alice McDermott

AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER Named a Best Book of the Year by Time, Esquire, Good Housekeeping, Kirkus Reviews, Los Angeles Times, NPR, Oprah Daily, Real Simple, and Vogue A riveting account of women’s lives on the margins of the Vietnam War, from the renowned winner of the National Book Award. American women—American wives—have been mostly minor characters in the literature of the Vietnam War, but in Absolution they take center stage. Tricia is a shy newlywed, married to a rising attorney on loan to navy intelligence. Charlene is a practiced corporate spouse and mother of three, a beauty and a bully. In Saigon in 1963, the two women form a wary alliance as they balance the era’s mandate to be “helpmeets” to their ambitious husbands with their own inchoate impulse to “do good” for the people of Vietnam. Sixty years later, Charlene’s daughter, spurred by an encounter with an aging Vietnam vet, reaches out to Tricia. Together, they look back at their time in Saigon, taking wry account of that pivotal year and of Charlene’s altruistic machinations, and discovering how their own lives as women on the periphery—of politics, of history, of war, of their husbands’ convictions—have been shaped and burdened by the same sort of unintended consequences that followed America’s tragic interference in Southeast Asia. A virtuosic new novel from Alice McDermott, one of our most observant, most affecting writers, about folly and grace, obligation, sacrifice, and, finally, the quest for absolution in a broken world.

En una oscura tarde de invierno, en el Brooklyn de principios del siglo xx, un joven inmigrante irlandés que acaba de ser despedido convence a su mujer, que está a punto de dar a luz, para que salga a hacer la compra. Una vez solo en el apartamento, abre el gas y se suicida. La hermana St. Saviour, una monja de un convento cercano, será quien ayude a Annie, la pobre viuda, a rehacer su vida. Annie trabajará durante muchos años como planchadora en la lavandería del convento. Su hija Sally, la verdadera protagonista de la historia, se criará entre pilas de ropa blanca y el siseo constante de la plancha pero, llegado el momento, deberá elegir su propio camino en la vida. La novena hora es una preciosa novela, profundamente humana, sobre el perdón, la generosidad y el olvido. Con esta historia que recorre tres generaciones de un pequeño vecindario de Brooklyn, Alice McDermott vuelve a demostrar que es una de las más notables escritoras norteamericanas en activo. «La novela es literariamente impecable por la espléndida construcción de personajes, la credibilidad de una voz narrativa comunitaria, el naturalismo de los episodios sanitarios y, sobre todo, porque la sombra y la luz de los valores sobre los que McDermott se y nos interroga se hacen estilo: un estilo limpio, ambivalente, arriesgado, moral, respetuoso.»Marta Sanz (El País) «Como es habitual en todas sus obras, la prosa de Alice McDermott es natural a la vez que detallista, capaz de crear completos cuadros sensoriales en tres líneas. (...) Poco enrevesada, va describiendo las distintas acciones a un ritmo marcado, regular y poco sostenido, sin posibilidad de dar marcha atrás.»Ana Punset (Diari de Tarragona) «Hubiera sido fácil caer en el sentimentalismo en una obra como esta, pero la autora no ha tropezado ni una sola vez en esa piedra. Ella es capaz de mayores logros: conseguir una atmósfera que aliente a lo largo de la novela y transmitir con un final arriesgado y conmovedor que esta es una historia que habla ante todo de sacrificio y generosidad.»S. Fdez.-Prieto (La Razón)

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 a gas tap in his Brooklyn tenement. He is determined to prove—to the subway bosses who have recently fired him, to his 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, appears, 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, and 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 through 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.

La vida, con sus pequeñas alegrías y momentos de felicidad, pero también con sus tristezas y desconcertantes altibajos, es el tema de esta novela extraordinaria. Los recuerdos aparentemente dispersos y desordenados de Marie Commeford, la protagonista y narradora de esta historia, una neoyorquina de origen irlandés, nos envuelven en una telaraña invisible en la que se entretejen la infancia, el despertar sexual, los primeros amores, la maternidad, la formación de una familia y la vejez. En su narración, que recorre siete décadas de vida en Brooklyn, las escenas encajan con una ligereza y naturalidad pasmosas, convirtiendo en emocionante la que en apariencia era una existencia como tantas otras.Una novela que nos reconcilia con los desengaños y las ilusiones cotidianas, con las pequeñas exigencias de la vida que tantas veces nos dominan y condicionan, y que confirma a Alice McDermott (ganadora del National Book Award y dos veces finalista del Pulitzer) como una de las más destacadas escritoras norteamericanas contemporáneas.

Alice McDermott evocative second novel, beautifully rejacketed to tie-in with the paperback of her most recent novel, Child of My Heart

The quietest life can resonate the longest. A beautiful, bittersweet masterpiece about a remarkable journey of the heart SHORTLISTED FOR THE INTERNATIONAL IMPAC DUBLIN LITERARY AWARD 2015 LONGLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD 2014 Someone begins on the stoop of a Brooklyn apartment building where Marie is waiting for her father to come home from work. It is the 1920s and in her Irish-American enclave the stories of her neighbours unfold before her short-sighted eyes. As the years pass Marie''s own history plays out against the backdrop of a changing world. This is the story of one life in all its devastating pains and unexpected joys; its bursts of brilliant clarity and moments of profound confusion. Fragments of a curious childhood, of adolescent sexual awakenings, of motherhood and, finally, old age are pieced together in this resonant tale of an unremarkable, unforgettable woman. ______________________ ''A beautiful book'' Sunday Telegraph ''Masterful'' Irish Times ''Exquisite'' New York Times

On a wild, windy April day in Manhattan, when Mary first meets John Keane, she cannot know what lies ahead of her. A marriage, a fleeting season of romance, and the birth of four children will bring John and Mary to rest in the safe embrace of a traditional Catholic life in the suburbs. But neither Mary nor John, distracted by memories and longings, can feel the wind that is buffeting their children, leading them in directions beyond their parents’ control. Michael and his sister Annie are caught up in the sexual revolution. Jacob, brooding and frail, is drafted to Vietnam. And the youngest, Clare, commits a stunning transgression after a childhood spent pleasing her parents. As John and Mary struggle to hold on to their family and their faith, Alice McDermott weaves an elegant, unforgettable portrait of a world in flux–and of the secrets and sorrows, anger and love, that lie at the heart of every family.

A young girl''s astonishing, poignant first look into the turbulent heart of things "I had in my care that summer four dogs, three cats, the Moran kids, Daisy, my eight-year-old cousin, and Flora, the toddler child of a local artist. There was also, for a while, a litter of wild rabbits, three of them, that had been left under our back steps.... " Alice McDermott''s haunting and enchanting new work of fiction--her first since the bestselling Charming Billy, winner of the 1998 National Book Award--is narrated by a woman who was born beautiful. Her parents decided that her best chance in life was to marry a wealthy man, so she was raised on the east end of Long Island, among the country houses of the rich. On the cusp of fifteen, she is the town''s most sought-after babysitter--cheerful, beloved, a wonder with children and animals, but also a solitary soul with an already complex understanding of human nature--when her favorite cousin, Daisy, comes to spend the summer. The narrator''s witty, piquant, deeply etched evocation of all that was really transpiring under the surface during that seemingly idyllic season gives her wry tale--infused with suppressed passion, disappointment, and enduring hope--its remarkable vividness and impact. Once again, Alice McDermott explores the mysterious depths of what seems like everyday life with unforgettable insight and resonant emotional power.

This is a luminous novel of memory, revelation and desire

A moving evocation of life''s inexplicable calamities and also a magical celebration of childhood and the bonds of family, At Weddings and Wakes is the story of three generations of an Irish-American family through the eyes of its youngest members

Praised in the highest terms by reviewers, the story of a charming, romantic Irish American explores the impact of his life and death on his family and his close-knit New York City neighborhood. Reprint.