A riveting account of women's lives on the margins of the Vietnam War, from the renowned winner of the National Book Award.

You have no idea what it was like. For us. The women, I mean. The wives.
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.
Sixty years later, Charlene's daughter, spurred by an encounter with an aging Vietnam vet, reaches out to Tricia. Together, they look back at their time in Saigon, taking wry account of that pivotal year and of Charlene's...]]> Sun, 26 Nov 2023 08:45:36 +0200 https://www.bookfrom.net/alice-mcdermott/641659-what_about_the_baby_.html https://www.bookfrom.net/alice-mcdermott/641659-what_about_the_baby_.html

A collection of essays, lectures, and observations on the art of writing fiction from an expert novelist
Look: Artistic inspiration, religious faith, does not come to most of us with the beating of wings or the leaping of flames or the cinematic, middle-of-the-night aha moment that cuts to an acceptance speech in Stockholm. It comes through long effort, through moving ahead and falling back, through working in the dark. It comes to us in moments of passionate intuition and over long days and nights of painful silence. It arrives in the usual and yet miraculous confluence of ordinary events. It comes and goes. It leaves us in doubt. It is sustained by doubt. It is the work of a lifetime.
What About the Baby? Some Thoughts on the Art of Fiction gathers Alice McDermott's essays and lectures regarding her own "work of a lifetime" as a bestselling novelist and professor of writing. From technical advice ("check that your verbs aren't burdened by...]]> Tue, 09 Mar 2021 08:40:30 +0200 https://www.bookfrom.net/alice-mcdermott/88034-a_bigamists_daughter.html https://www.bookfrom.net/alice-mcdermott/88034-a_bigamists_daughter.html
Elizabeth Connelly sits in a New York office that looks like a real editor's, but isn't quite. Employed at a vanity press, Elizabeth watches the real world - of real struggles, passion, pain and love - spin around her.Until one day, a young writer comes to her with a novel about a man who loves more than one woman at once. And suddenly Elizabeth will be awakened from her young urban professional slumber - by a man's real touch and by a real story in search of an ending. This is a luminous novel of memory, revelation and desire.]]> Mon, 09 Nov 1981 17:48:49 +0300 https://www.bookfrom.net/alice-mcdermott/88041-child_of_my_heart.html https://www.bookfrom.net/alice-mcdermott/88041-child_of_my_heart.html
On the cusp of fifteen, pretty Theresa is the town's most sought-after babysitter - cheerful, beloved, adored by children and animals, but also a solitary soul with an already complex understanding of human nature. She is Titania among her fairies, the one person to call on for help with a child in extreme distress.Theresa does not doubt her power over the fathers of her adoring charges either, whose potential lechery Theresa toys with like a kitten with yarn. Yet during this unforgettable summer, it is her cousin Daisy, a frail little creature with glittery shoes and worrying bruises that don't heal, in whom Theresa invests her greatest love.Infused with suppressed passion, disappointment, and enduring hope, Alice McDermott's wonderful new novel reveals a world seen afresh through the eyes of an utterly seductive girl.]]> Sun, 09 Nov 2003 17:48:50 +0200 https://www.bookfrom.net/alice-mcdermott/88040-the_ninth_hour.html https://www.bookfrom.net/alice-mcdermott/88040-the_ninth_hour.html
A portrait of the Irish-American experience in the 1940s and 1950s, by the National Book Award-winning authorOn 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. Rendered with remarkable lucidity and...]]> Mon, 09 Nov 1998 17:48:50 +0200 https://www.bookfrom.net/alice-mcdermott/88038-at_weddings_and_wakes.html https://www.bookfrom.net/alice-mcdermott/88038-at_weddings_and_wakes.html