Standalone Novels In Publication Order
- A Bigamist’s Daughter (1982)
- That Night (1987)
- At Weddings and Wakes (1992)
- Charming Billy (1998)
- Child Of My Heart (2002)
- After This (2006)
- Someone (2013)
- The Ninth Hour (2017)
Collections In Publication Order
- What about the Baby? (2021)
Standalone Novels Book Covers
Collections Book Covers
Alice McDermott Books Overview
A Bigamist’s Daughter
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, by a real story in search of an ending, by the unraveling of the greatest masquerade of all in Alice McDermott s luminous novel of memory, revelation, and desire.
That Night
On a warm suburban night, the sound of lawn sprinklers is drowned out by the rumble of hot rods. Suddenly a car careens onto a family’s neat front yard, teenage boys spill out brandishing chains and leather, and a young man cries out for the girl he loves. Tonight fathers will pick up snow shovels and rakes to defend their turf, and children will witness a battle fueled by fierce, true love. This is the night they will talk about and remember as the moment everything changed forever.
At Weddings and Wakes
Twice a week, Lucy Dailey leaves suburbia with her three children in tow, returning to the Brooklyn home where she grew up and where her stepmother and unmarried sisters still live. Aunt Veronica, with her wounded face and dreams of beauty, drowns her sorrows in drink. Aunt Agnes, an acerbic student of elegance, sips only from the finest crystal as she sees Aunt May, the ex nun, blossom with a late and unexpected love. And all the while, the children watch, absorbing the legacy of their haunted family. At once a moving evocation of life’s inexplicable calamities and a magical celebration of childhood and familial love, At Weddings and Wakes is the story of three generations of an Irish American family through the eyes of its youngest members. With eloquence and grace, master storyteller Alice McDermott transforms everyday experience into the heroic and universal.
Charming Billy
In a small bar somewhere in the Bronx, a funeral party has gathered to honor Billy Lynch. Through the night, his friends and family will weave together the tale of a husband, lover, dreamer, and storyteller, but also that of a hopeless drunk whose immense charm was but a veil over a lifetime of secrets and all-consuming sorrow. As they comfort his widow, the gentle Maeve, they remember as well his first love, Eva, who died of pneumonia, and whose ghost haunted his marriage and drove him to the bottle. Who is truly responsible for Billy’s life and death, and what does it mean to mythologize a friend’s suffering? Beautifully written and teeming with fine portraits of Irish-American life in New York, Charming Billy is a masterful novel about how a community can pin its dreams to one man, and how good intentions can be as destructive as the truth they were meant to hide.
Child Of My Heart
A young girl’s astonishing, poignant first look into the turbulent heart of things’I had in my care that summer four dogs, three cats, the Moran kids, Daisy, my eight year old cousin, and Flora, the toddler child of a local artist. There was also, for a while, a litter of wild rabbits, three of them, that had been left under our back steps…
. ‘Alice McDermott’s haunting and enchanting new work of fiction her first since the bestselling Charming Billy, winner of the 1998 National Book Award is narrated by a woman who was born beautiful. Her parents decided that her best chance in life was to marry a wealthy man, so she was raised on the east end of Long Island, among the country houses of the rich. On the cusp of fifteen, she is the town’s most sought after babysitter cheerful, beloved, a wonder with children and animals, but also a solitary soul with an already complex understanding of human nature when her favorite cousin, Daisy, comes to spend the summer. The narrator’s witty, piquant, deeply etched evocation of all that was really transpiring under the surface during that seemingly idyllic season gives her wry tale infused with suppressed passion, disappointment, and enduring hope its remarkable vividness and impact. Once again, Alice McDermott explores the mysterious depths of what seems like everyday life with unforgettable insight and resonant emotional power.
After This
Alice McDermott’s powerful novel is a vivid portrait of an American family in the middle decades of the twentieth century. Witty, compassionate, and wry, it captures the social, political, and spiritual upheavals of those decades through the experiences of a middle class couple, their four children, and the changing worlds in which they live. While Michael and Annie Keane taste the alternately intoxicating and bitter first fruits of the sexual revolution, their older, more tentative brother, Jacob, lags behind, until he finds himself on the way to Vietnam. Meanwhile, Clare, the youngest child of their aging parents, seeks to maintain an almost saintly innocence. After This, alive with the passions and tragedies of a determining era in our history, portrays the clash of traditional, faith bound life and modern freedom, while also capturing, with McDermott’s inimitable understanding and grace, the joy, sorrow, anger, and love that underpin, and undermine, what it is to be a family.
Related Authors