Alice McDermott

One life: its pains and joys; its bursts of clarity and moments of confusion. Scattered recollections -- of childhood, of sexual awakenings, of motherhood, and of old age -- come together in this story of an unremarkable woman's unforgettable life. We first meet Marie Commeford as a child, observing her pre-Depression world from a Brooklyn stoop. An innocuous encounter with a young neighbor named Pegeen Chehab establishes the novel's bittersweet refrain....

On a dim winter afternoon in Catholic Brooklyn, a young Irish immigrant opens the gas taps in his Brooklyn tenement. In the aftermath of the fire that follows, Sister St. Savior, an aging nun appears, unbidden, to direct the way forward for his widow and his unborn child. His suicide reverberates over the decades as decorum, superstition and shame collude to erase the man's brief existence.--From the publisher.

Alice McDermott's powerful novel is a vivid portrait of an American family in the middle decades of the twentieth century. Witty, compassionate, and wry, it captures the social, political, and spiritual upheavals of those decades through the experiences of a middle-class couple, their four children, and the changing worlds in which they live. While Michael and Annie Keane taste the alternately intoxicating and bitter first fruits of the sexual revolution,...

On a warm suburban night, the sound of lawn sprinklers is drowned out by the rumble of hot rods. Suddenly, a car careens onto a family's neat front yard, teenage boys spill out brandishing chains and leather, and a young man cries out for the girl he loves. Tonight, fathers will pick up snow shovels and rakes to defend their turf, and children will witness a battle fueled by fierce, true love. This is the night they will talk about, and remember,...

"Tricia is a newlywed, married to an attorney on loan to navy intelligence. Charlene is a practiced corporate spouse and mother of three. In Saigon in 1963, the two women form an alliance as they balance the era's mandate to be 'helpmeets' to their husbands with their own impulse to 'do good' for the people of Vietnam. Sixty years later, Charlene's altruistic machinations, discovering how their lives as women on the periphery have been shaped by the...