The ninth hour
By: Alice McDermott
Edition: Large print edition.
Series: Thorndike Press large print core; Thorndike Press large print core series
Publisher: Thorndike Press, a part of Gale, a Cengage Company
Published: 2017
Language: eng
Number of pages: 361
ISBN-13: 9781432841508
Copyright date: 2017
Subjects: Irish Americans; Widows; Large type books; Immigrants; Nuns; Fiction
Other titles: 9th hour
Description: 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.