Showing results by author "Alice McDermott" in All Categories

Bloomsbury presents Absolution by Alice McDermott, read by Jesse Vilinsky and Rachel Kenney. * THE TOP 10 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * 'One of the finest contemporary novels I've read ... A moral masterpiece' ANN PATCHETT 'Her writing has a luminous kind of clarity, a grace and scope that fills...

More than any other writer, Alice McDermott exposes the vein of poetry, of profound joy and pain that transforms everyday experience into the heroic and universal. At Weddings and Wakes tells the bittersweet, lovable, human story of an Irish-Catholic family on Long Island as seen through the eyes of two sisters and a brother.

Alice McDermott "is a genius of quiet observation", said the Los Angeles Times. "One of our finest novelists." McDermott's books include Charming Billy, winner of the National Book Award, and After This.

On a dim winter afternoon, a young Irish immigrant opens the gas taps 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 belong to himself alone'. In the aftermath of the fire that follows, Sister St. Savior, an aging nun, a Little Sister of the Sick Poor, appears, unbidden, to direct the way forward for his widow and his unborn child.