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The Ninth Hour
- A Novel
- Narrated by: Euan Morton
- Length: 8 hrs and 7 mins
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Publisher's summary
"[Euan Morton's] steady, gentle delivery allows McDermott's elegant prose to shine. It's a quiet story about love and sacrifice that manages to be extremely moving without becoming sentimental or maudlin. Morton's performance similarly brims with emotion but never overflows." (AudioFile magazine)
A magnificent new audiobook from one of America's finest writers - a powerfully affecting story spanning the twentieth century of a widow and her daughter and the nuns who serve their Irish-American community in Brooklyn.
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 appears, unbidden, to direct the way forward for his widow and his unborn child.
We begin deep inside Catholic Brooklyn, in the early part of the twentieth century. Decorum, superstition, and shame collude to erase the man's brief existence. Yet his suicide, although never spoken of, reverberates through many lives and over the decades testing the limits and the demands of love and sacrifice, of forgiveness and forgetfulness, even through multiple generations.
The characters we meet - from Sally, the unborn baby at the beginning of the audiobook who becomes the center of the story, to the nuns whose personalities we come to know and love, to the neighborhood families with whose lives they are entwined - are all rendered with extraordinary sympathy and McDermott's trademark lucidity and intelligence. Alice McDermott's The Ninth Hour is a crowning achievement by one of the premiere writers at work in America today, and the audio edition is truly unforgettable.
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- Narrated by: Carla Mercer-Meyer
- Length: 12 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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On any particular day, thousands upon thousands of people pass through New York City's Grand Central Terminal, through the whispering gallery, beneath the ceiling of stars, and past the information booth and its beckoning four-faced clock, to whatever destination is calling them. It is a place where people come to say hello and good-bye. And each person has a story to tell.
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Grand Central: Memories
- By ZacharyKindle Customer on 05-03-17
By: Melanie Benjamin, and others
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Fludd
- A Novel
- By: Hilary Mantel
- Narrated by: Gordon Griffin
- Length: 6 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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One dark and stormy night in 1956, a stranger named Fludd mysteriously turns up in the dismal village of Fetherhoughton. He is the curate sent by the bishop to assist Father Angwin - or is he? In the most unlikely of places, a superstitious town that understands little of romance or sentimentality, where bad blood between neighbors is ancient and impenetrable, miracles begin to bloom. Fludd becomes lover, gravedigger, and savior, transforming his dull office into a golden regency of decision, unashamed sensation, and unprecedented action.
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Small, tight irreverant novel that wryly inverts
- By Darwin8u on 07-21-13
By: Hilary Mantel
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A Golden Age
- A Novel
- By: Tahmima Anam
- Narrated by: Madhur Jaffrey
- Length: 9 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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As young widow Rehana Haque awakes one March morning, she might be forgiven for feeling happy. Today she will throw a party for her son and daughter. In the garden of the house she has built, her roses are blooming, her children are almost grown, and beyond their doorstep, the city is buzzing with excitement after recent elections. Change is in the air.
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sad, poignant, thought-provoking, beautiful
- By Rio Delta Wild on 06-04-08
By: Tahmima Anam
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Memphis
- A Novel
- By: Tara M. Stringfellow
- Narrated by: Karen Murray, Adenrele Ojo, Tara Stringfellow
- Length: 9 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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Summer 1995: Ten-year-old Joan, her mother, and her younger sister flee her father’s explosive temper and seek refuge at her mother’s ancestral home in Memphis. This is not the first time violence has altered the course of the family’s trajectory. Half a century earlier, Joan’s grandfather built this majestic house in the historic Black neighborhood of Douglass—only to be lynched days after becoming the first Black detective in the city. Joan tries to settle into her new life, but family secrets cast a longer shadow than any of them expected.
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Awful narrator
- By Rachael edwards on 06-07-22
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The Outcast
- By: Jolina Petersheim
- Narrated by: Tavia Gilbert
- Length: 9 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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Rachel Stoltzfus never imagined she’d be the talk of her Old Order Mennonite community until whispers stir the moment her belly swells with new life. Unmarried and refusing to repent by naming the partner in her sin, Rachel feels the wrath of the religious sect as she is shunned by those she loves most and eventually forced to leave - driven out by her twin sister’s husband, the bishop. But secrets run deep in this cloistered community, and the bishop is hiding some of his own, threatening his conscience and his very soul.
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full story not the norm for amish fiction
- By susan on 09-15-13
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The School of Mirrors
- A Novel
- By: Eva Stachniak
- Narrated by: Ell Potter
- Length: 16 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
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During the reign of Louis XV, impoverished but lovely teenage girls from all over France are sent to a discreet villa in the town of Versailles. Overseen by the King’s favorite mistress, Madame de Pompadour, they will be trained as potential courtesans for the King. When the time is right, each girl is smuggled into the palace of Versailles, with its legendary Hall of Mirrors.
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Fascinating and Heartbreaking
- By HistoryNerd on 08-21-22
By: Eva Stachniak
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Freud's Mistress
- By: Karen Mack, Jennifer Kaufman
- Narrated by: Suzanne Toren
- Length: 10 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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In this sweeping tale of love, loyalty, and betrayal - between a husband and a wife, between sisters - fact and fiction seamlessly blend together, creating a compelling portrait of an unforgettable woman and her struggle to reconcile her love for her sister with her obsessive desire for her sister's husband, the mythic father of psychoanalysis.
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What a Super Ego
- By Mel on 07-12-13
By: Karen Mack, and others
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Church of Marvels
- A Novel
- By: Leslie Parry
- Narrated by: Denice Stradling
- Length: 10 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
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New York, 1895. Sylvan Threadgill, a night soiler cleaning out the privies behind the tenement houses, finds an abandoned newborn baby in the muck. An orphan himself, Sylvan rescues the child, determined to find where she belongs.
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If Dickens needed a NY location for a story..
- By Sandi from Oregon on 05-13-15
By: Leslie Parry
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Sula
- By: Toni Morrison
- Narrated by: Toni Morrison
- Length: 5 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
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Nel and Sula's devotion is fierce enough to withstand bullies and the burden of a dreadful secret. It endures even after Nel has grown up to be a pillar of the black community and Sula has become a pariah. But their friendship ends in an unforgivable betrayal—or does it end? Terrifying, comic, ribald and tragic, Sula is a work that overflows with life.
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Good against evil and a riotous story to boot
- By Karen on 04-11-11
By: Toni Morrison
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Promise
- A Novel
- By: Minrose Gwin
- Narrated by: Adenrele Ojo
- Length: 12 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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In the aftermath of a devastating tornado that rips through the town of Tupelo, Mississippi, at the height of the Great Depression, two women worlds apart - one Black, one White; one a great-grandmother, the other a teenager - fight for their families' survival in this lyrical and powerful novel.
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Mostly Disappointing
- By Anjoli on 06-15-19
By: Minrose Gwin
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Yankee Wife
- By: Linda Lael Miller
- Narrated by: Pilar Witherspoon
- Length: 12 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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A year after the Civil War, courageous former Union nurse Lydia McQuire was gamely scraping out an honest living. But now, as she said yes to marrying a stranger, her knees gave way with fear. Mr. Devon Quade had seemed polite and handsome when she answered his ad for a wife. Only after Lydia had arrived in Washington territory did she learn that her bridegroom wasn't to be sweet Devon Quade, but his older brother Brigham. Lydia's dislike of him was instantaneous...yet Brigham was awakening in her a white-hot passion.
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Loved the female lead of this book
- By Tiffany Blystone on 10-12-18
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The Blind Assassin
- By: Margaret Atwood
- Narrated by: Margot Dionne
- Length: 18 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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For the past twenty-five years, Margaret Atwood has written works of striking originality and imagination. In The Blind Assassin, she stretches the limits of her accomplishments as never before, creating a novel that is entertaining and profoundly serious. The novel opens with these simple, resonant words: "Ten days after the war ended, my sister drove a car off the bridge." They are spoken by Iris, whose terse account of her sister Laura's death in 1945 is followed by an inquest report proclaiming the death accidental.
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Good book, TERRIBLE audio!
- By Whitney on 04-27-09
By: Margaret Atwood
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Alice McDermott's masterful new novel is a vivd portrait of an American family caught at the crossroads of the tumultuous middle decades of the 20th century. Witty, compassionate, and wry, After This evokes the social, political, and spiritual upheavals of its time through the experiences of a working-class couple, John and Mary Keane, their four children, and the changes radiating through their Catholic community on Long Island.
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The beautiful child of older parents, raised on the eastern end of Long Island among the summer houses of the rich, Theresa is the town's most sough-after babysitter - cheerful, poised, an effortless storyteller, a wonder with children and animals. Among her charges this fateful summer is Daisy, her younger cousin, who has left a crowded working-class household in the city to spend a few quiet weeks in this bucolic place, under Theresa's benevolent eye.
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Stuggling to finish this book
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Elizabeth Connelly, editor at a New York vanity press, sells the dream of publication (admittedly, to writers of questionable talent). Stories of true emotional depth rarely cross her desk. But when a young writer named Tupper Daniels walks in, bearing an unfinished novel, Elizabeth is drawn to both the novelist and his story—a lyrical tale about a man in love with more than one woman at once. Tupper's manuscript unlocks memories of her own secretive father, who himself may have been a bigamist.
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What a graceful novel!
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Alice McDermott's masterful new novel is a vivd portrait of an American family caught at the crossroads of the tumultuous middle decades of the 20th century. Witty, compassionate, and wry, After This evokes the social, political, and spiritual upheavals of its time through the experiences of a working-class couple, John and Mary Keane, their four children, and the changes radiating through their Catholic community on Long Island.
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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.
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Stuggling to finish this book
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A Bigamist's Daughter
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Elizabeth Connelly, editor at a New York vanity press, sells the dream of publication (admittedly, to writers of questionable talent). Stories of true emotional depth rarely cross her desk. But when a young writer named Tupper Daniels walks in, bearing an unfinished novel, Elizabeth is drawn to both the novelist and his story—a lyrical tale about a man in love with more than one woman at once. Tupper's manuscript unlocks memories of her own secretive father, who himself may have been a bigamist.
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American women—American wives—have been mostly minor characters in the literature of the Vietnam War, but in Absolution they take center stage. Tricia is a shy newlywed, married to a rising attorney on loan to navy intelligence. Charlene is a practiced corporate spouse and mother of three, a beauty and a bully. In Saigon in 1963, the two women form a wary alliance as they balance the era’s mandate to be “helpmeets” to their ambitious husbands with their own, inchoate impulse to “do good” for the people of Vietnam.
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The narration was brilliant…totally engrossing and beautifully spoken
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What About the Baby?: Some Thoughts on the Art of Fiction gathers the best-selling novelist Alice McDermott’s pithiest wisdom about her chosen art, acquired over a lifetime as an acclaimed writer and teacher of writing.
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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.
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Alice McDermott is great, Rosenblatt is an a-hole
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The lands of Arbonne and Gorhaut are on the verge of an all-consuming conflict. When a devious high priest of Gorhaut seizes the opportunity to wage a holy war against residents of Arbonne, an epic clash between the two cultures ensues.
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Beautiful, moving, full of suspence and adventure
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When store manager Big Will announces he is leaving, the members of Movement spot an opportunity. If they play their cards right, one of them just might land a management job, with all the stability and possibility for advancement that that implies. The members of Team Movement―including a comedy-obsessed oddball who acts half his age, a young woman clinging on to her “cool kid” status from high school, and a college football hopeful trying to find a new path―band together to set a just-so-crazy-it-might-work plot in motion.
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Ferris
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It’s the summer before fifth grade, and for Ferris Wilkey, it is a summer of sheer pandemonium: Her little sister, Pinky, has vowed to become an outlaw. Uncle Ted has left Aunt Shirley and, to Ferris’s mother’s chagrin, is holed up in the Wilkey basement to paint a history of the world. And Charisse, Ferris’s grandmother, has started seeing a ghost at the threshold of her room, which seems like an alarming omen given that she is also feeling unwell. But the ghost is not there to usher Charisse to the Great Beyond. Rather, she has other plans—wild, impractical, illuminating plans.
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New favorite, reader exceptional
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January 1921. Though the Great War is over, in Ireland a new civil war is raging. The once-grand Kilcolgan House, a crumbling bastion shrouded in sea mist, lies half empty and filled with ghosts, both real and imagined, while it shelters the surviving members of the Prendeville family. Then, when an IRA ambush goes terribly wrong, Maud Prendeville, Lord Kilcolgan’s eldest daughter, is killed, leaving the family reeling. Yet the IRA column behind the attack insists they left her alive, that someone else must be responsible for her terrible fate.
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Eleven-year-old Gopi has been playing squash since she was old enough to hold a racket. When her mother dies, her father enlists her in a quietly brutal training regimen, and the game becomes her world. Slowly, she grows apart from her sisters. Her life is reduced to the sport, guided by its rhythms: the serve, the volley, the drive, the shot and its echo. But on the court, she is not alone. She is with her pa. She is with Ged, a thirteen-year-old boy with his own formidable talent. She is with the players who have come before her. She is in awe.
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Quiet story that is really interesting
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The Princess of Las Vegas
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From the New York Times bestselling author of The Flight Attendant and The Lioness, a Princess Diana impersonator and her estranged sister find themselves drawn into a dangerous game of money and murder in this twisting tale of organized crime, cryptocurrency, and family secrets on the Las Vegas strip.
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At the time when the world changed, Hanni Kohn knows she must send her 12-year-old daughter away to save her from the Nazi regime. Her desperation leads her to Ettie, the daughter of a rabbi whose years spent eavesdropping on her father enables her to create a mystical Jewish creature, a rare and unusual golem, who is sworn to protect Hanni’s daughter, Lea.
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Not Her Best
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The Gathering
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Regarded as one of her country's foremost voices, Irish author Anne Enright makes a fresh mark on a rich literary tradition. The Gathering is a deeply insightful family saga, steeped in secrets and intrigue, unfolding over three generations.
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Not For Everyone
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Perestroika in Paris
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From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of A Thousand Acres and the New York Times best-selling Last Hundred Years Trilogy, a captivating, brilliantly imaginative story of three extraordinary animals - and a young boy - whose lives intersect in Paris.
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C’est Si Bon
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What listeners say about The Ninth Hour
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Sara
- 01-17-18
Profoundly Thought Provoking
The title of this book, The Ninth Hour, comes from the divine offices of the Christian Liturgy for Nones or the mid-afternoon--usually 3 pm--prayer cycle. More specifically it relates to Christ's last words on the cross when he asks why have you forsaken me. It speaks to the clash between faith and doubt.
The book is beautifully written and grew on me gradually with its gentle power and left me thinking long after I finished listening. McDermott is a master at weaving together storylines into a cohesive whole. She succeeds at making the characters three dimensional, real and completely relatable. The narration was excellent.
The book was set in early 1900s Brooklyn and tells the story of a nursing order of Roman Catholic nuns and the Irish community they served. These sisters tirelessly cared for the sick and the poor of their neighborhood. The story really focused on several generations of a family and their interactions with multiple generations of sisters too.
More than simply presenting the safety net the sisters provided historically, the author delves into concepts of selfishness and selflessness and just how far people will go for those they love. Further, ideas of sacrifice, happiness and where we draw the line when it comes to belief and faith are examined.
On the surface this starts out as a simple story but give it time. Difficult topics ahead--but the writing is more than up to the task. I don't mean to make the book sound like it's all about religion--it's really about how people live out their lives within the framework of belief or unbelief. Excellent historic fiction.
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38 people found this helpful
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- Taryn
- 10-11-17
My new fav for 2017! Must listen and read!
First off I am a big McDermott fan. This book is my new favorite and definitely my favorite listen of 2017. Her characters are so beautifully crafted, perfectly imperfect as are all human beings. She brings you right back to the time period, the sights, sounds, smells, emotions. I loved the narration, but now that I finished listening I am going to have to read the hard copy. I need to savor what I may have missed. This is a MUST LISTEN for 2017! #nostalgic #gritty #tearjerker #tagsgiving #sweepstakes
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26 people found this helpful
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- D. Jacobsen
- 10-04-17
I Loved it
I wish I were articulate and clever in writing reviews. I am not. Not very often do I take the time to write anything about a book. Usually, I just use stars. But this book gripped me and kept me paying attention throughout. Often, I went back to listen to parts a second time. I wanted to be sure I was getting it all. I keep a list of books to listen to (or read) again. This title is going on that list! I loved it!
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14 people found this helpful
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- Phyllis
- 10-11-17
More, Please!
The writing was beautiful, almost like creating paintings with words. Yet the story seemed oddly limited. After creating a world for finely drawn characters, I expected a story that had more depth.
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10 people found this helpful
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- josber13
- 12-18-17
9 long hours
Every word is exquisitely written. It's the waiting for something to happen that I found slightly tedious. Make no mistake, something eventually does happen, but to get there you need to buckle in for a long journey through beautifully crafted scenes of varying lengths and unpredictably shifting points of view.
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8 people found this helpful
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- Betsey
- 10-06-17
McDermott continues to delight.
I have read all of Alice McDermott's novels and each one surpasses her previous works. The character of Sally is complex, a product of her mother's strong work ethic and her exposure to the good Little Sisters of the Poor. Having grown up in a city with their presence, I can attest to their quiet humility and compassion in treating the elderly. Even the characters who were less than central to the story are carefully drawn and intriguing. Wonderful book!
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8 people found this helpful
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- E. Murray
- 09-25-17
Glorious
Alice McDermott, you do it every time. Such beauty. Never wanted it to end. I will be listening to Charming Billy next. Read it when it came out but if it is as lovely as The Ninth Hour it will be a gift to myself.
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6 people found this helpful
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- Lenore
- 10-05-17
Pure magic
A gentle simple story beautifully written and beautifully performed
McDermott gives us characters of such quiet strength
What a wonderful read
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- Anonymous User
- 09-27-18
Boring
This book is boring beyond belief. Still can’t figure out why I finished it. The narrator, however does a great performance.
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- Lisa Harvey
- 05-20-18
Dark and Thought-Provoking
A dark, thought-provoking and moving story about an Irish immigrant family and a community of nuns who thanklessly care for the sick and the poor.
SUMMARY
Late one winter afternoon, Jim ushered his wife out the door to do some shopping. After she leaves, this Irish immigrant subway worker blocked the door, covered the windows and opened up the gas taps in their Brooklyn tenement. His suicide would forever alter the lives of his wife, Annie, and his unborn daughter, Sally. Despite being aided and shepherded by a community of nursing nuns, Annie and Sally struggle with life decisions and their moral compass in years following Jim’s death. The story is narrated by one of Sally’s children, with the focus on Sally’s life, as well as the lives and works of the nuns who administer to the need of the Brooklyn Irish immigrant community.
“Fairness demanded that grief should find succor, that wounds should heal, insults and confusion find recompense and certainty, that every living person God has made should not, willy-nilly, be forever unmade.”
REVIEW
The Ninth Hour is the time for afternoon prayers for the nursing nuns. It’s a time to ask for God’s mercy for the ills and sins of their community. Annie and Sallie needed the nuns prayers, as did so many others in their Brooklyn neighborhood. Set in the first half of the twentieth century, THE NINTH HOUR is dark and affecting. The prose was masterfully descriptive, evocative and emotional. The detailed descriptions of the grim aspects of illnesses and death that the nuns experienced, among the poor were gritty. One of the most poignant chapters in the book was innocent Sally’s dramatic train trip to Chicago. She was going to Chicago to join a convent, but the shocking experiences with the coarse people she encountered on the train caused her to change her mind. She immediately returned to Brooklyn, only to find that things had changed there in her brief absence.
The characters were complex and plentiful. Issues of death, depression, sin, reparations, secrets and guilt are explored. Lovers of dark and affecting literary fiction will appreciate THE NINTH HOUR. This is McDermontt’s eight novel. She has received The National Book (2017), the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Fiction (2018), and the Kirkus Prize for Fiction ( 2017), for this book.
Publisher Farrah Straus and Giroux
Publication Date September 19, 2017
Narrated Euan Morton
“She saw how the skim of filth, which was despair, which was hopelessness, fell like soot on the lives of the poor.”
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