The Ninth Hour: Alice McDermott - Tapa blanda

Alongside her marvellous descriptions of unbeautiful bodies is an intense lyricism . McDermott is so attentive to atmospheres, glances, the quietest moments that provoke profound shifts in a character's world ... Her new book unfolds without sentimentality or pity, but with a frankness of gaze that elevates her characters rather than diminishes them. Mercy, it seems, doesn't always take the forms we might imagine (Molly McCloskey Guardian 2017-10-21)

Beautifully written, heart-wrenching and funny by turns, and offers a deeply vivid and authentic portrayal of Brooklyn long before its hipsters arrived (Sunday Times 2017-11-19)

Dealing in simple lives and small dramas, the prose displays an unerring sense of detail, mood, and emotion. A masterful American writer at her best (Jeffrey Burke Mail on Sunday 2017-10-01)

From the perfect opening sentence of this latest book by the American Pulitzer Prize finalist, you know you are in safe hands . McDermott depicts with sensuous intensity the texture of lives lived and the intersection of faith and sin in a remarkable novel marked by small, but transformative, acts of grace (Daily Mail 2017-10-20)

She is a poet of corporeal description . It's the way she marries the spirit to the physical world that make her work transcendent. The Ninth Hour is a story with the simple grace of a votive candle in a dark church (Sarah Begley Time 2017-10-02)

Superb and masterful . Powerful and sublime ... Her sentences burn on the page (Washington Post 2017-09-14)

This is a very fine novel and its focus on the quietly heroic lives of Catholic women in early twentieth-century Brooklyn enriches both McDermott's oeuvre and contemporary fiction more generally (Sinead Moynihan Irish Times 2017-10-21)

Ms. McDermott has once again managed a marvellous literary feat (Wall Street Journal 2017-09-15)

A tour de force ... McDermott is a virtuoso of language and image, allusion and reflection, reference and symbol ... McDermott once again demonstrates her expansively attentive literary care and its quiet power . Reminds us of the pleasures of literary fiction and its power to illuminate lives and worlds (Boston Globe 2017-09-14)

Ramshackle, impoverished Brooklyn is evoked with confidence and precision (Claire Lowdon Spectator 2017-10-28)