July Book Club
Join us in the new Irish Cultural Center Book Club. We’ll enjoy good craic and delve into Irish and Irish-American literature, with guided discussion in a welcoming, relaxed atmosphere. This event is open to all, Patrons and the general public.
Our July meeting will take place on Thursday, July 13 from 5:30–6:30 pm in the Celtic Room at the Trinity Pub. Light appetizers will be provided. You are welcome to stay after at the Trinity Pub to socialize with dinner or drinks.
We are reading “The Ninth Hour” by Alice McDermott, a magnificent new novel from one of America’s finest writers – a powerfully affecting story spanning the 20th century of a widow and her daughter and the nuns who serve their Irish-American community in Brooklyn.
To Register
The Book Club is free to join. Please pre-register so we know how many people to expect. Register online >
About “The Ninth Hour”
From National Book Award-winner and Pulitzer Prize Finalist Alice McDermott, “The Ninth Hour” is the critically-acclaimed “haunting and vivid portrait of an Irish Catholic clan in early twentieth century America” (The Associated Press).
On a dim winter afternoon, a young Irish immigrant opens a gas tap in his Brooklyn tenement. He is determined to prove―to the subway bosses who have recently fired him, to his pregnant wife―that “the hours of his life . . . belonged to himself alone.” In the aftermath of the fire that follows, Sister St. Saviour, an aging nun, a Little Nursing 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, though 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 delicacy, heart, and intelligence, Alice McDermott’s “The Ninth Hour” is a crowning achievement of one of the finest American writers at work today. (text from Amazon.com)
Available from several vendors online or your favorite local book shop. Or, check your local library.
• Amazon.com (new)
• Better Worlds Books (used)