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September 27, 2017 @ 8:00 pm

Free

Alice McDermott

Details

Date:
September 27, 2017
Time:
8:00 pm
Cost:
Free

Venue

Books & Books in Coral Gables
265 Aragon Ave
Coral Gables, FL 33134

Phone:
305.442.4408

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 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, 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.

About the Author:

Alice McDermott is the author of seven previous novels, including After ThisChild of My HeartCharming Billy, winner of the 1998 National Book Award; At Weddings and Wakes; and Someone―all published by FSG. That NightAt Weddings and Wakes, and After This were all finalists for the Pulitzer Prize. Her stories and essays have appeared in The New York TimesThe Washington PostThe New YorkerHarper’s Magazine, and elsewhere. She is the Richard A. Macksey Professor of the Humanities at Johns Hopkins University.

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