The ninth hour

Resource Information

The work The ninth hour represents a distinct intellectual or artistic creation found in City of Stirling Library Services. This resource is a combination of several types including: Work, Language Material, Books.

Label

The ninth hour

Statement of responsibility

Alice McDermott

Creator

• McDermott, Alice

Author

• McDermott, Alice

Subject

• Irish Americans -- Fiction
• Large type books
• Nuns -- Fiction
• Suicide -- Fiction
• Domestic fiction
• Widows -- Fiction
• Immigrants -- Fiction

Genre

• Large type books
• Fiction
• Domestic fiction

Language

eng

Summary

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. 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, although 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

Index

no index present

Literary form

fiction

Target audience

adult