Alice McDermott | The Ninth Hour

Recorded October 23, 2017

Pulling the delicate threads of “fear and vulnerability, joy and passion, the capacity for love and pain and grief” (The Washington Post), Alice McDermott’s acclaimed fiction explores intersecting stories of familial love, Irish American culture and assimilation, and the hard-wrought lessons of adulthood. The Richard A. Macksey Professor of the Humanities at Johns Hopkins University, her novels include Someone, Charming Billy—winner of the 1998 National Book Award—and That Night, At Weddings and Wakes, and After This—all finalists for the Pulitzer Prize. In The Ninth Hour, McDermott follows a young mother struggling with Catholic forgiveness and shame in the wake of her husband’s violent suicide in early 20th-century Brooklyn.

[DeanHiltonYoung]

The 9th hour is the time of Christ's death on the cross according to the Gospel of Mark.