5/20/2023 0 Comments The ninth books![]() ![]() They change sheets, diapers, and bedpans, scrub homes and wipe bottoms. The unpaid, unlicensed equivalent of social workers and visiting nurses, they trudge from one derelict walkup to another, bearing apple sauce, poultices, and aspirin. The Little Nursing Sisters of the Sick Poor are not the cruel knuckle-rappers that dominate parochial school fiction. ![]() ![]() Who cares about nuns? Read this book, and you will. The Ninth Hour, McDermott's eighth novel, is about an order of nursing nuns and the needy families, elderly shut-ins, disabled invalids and strapped widows they care for in a predominantly Irish Catholic neighborhood of Brooklyn. And, like Tyler, in focusing tightly on a close-knit community of ordinary people, she leads us to a deeper understanding of the human condition. ![]() In one beautifully observed, quietly absorbing novel after another, Alice McDermott has made the insular world of New York's Irish Catholic immigrants in the first half of the 20th century her own, much as Anne Tyler has laid claim to Baltimore's middle class. Your purchase helps support NPR programming. Close overlay Buy Featured Book Title The Ninth Hour Author Alice McDermott ![]()
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