
The Ninth Hour
A Novel
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Narrated by:
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Euan Morton
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By:
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Alice McDermott
About this listen
"[Euan Morton's] steady, gentle delivery allows McDermott's elegant prose to shine. It's a quiet story about love and sacrifice that manages to be extremely moving without becoming sentimental or maudlin. Morton's performance similarly brims with emotion but never overflows." (AudioFile magazine)
A magnificent new audiobook from one of America's finest writers - a powerfully affecting story spanning the twentieth century of a widow and her daughter and the nuns who serve their Irish-American community in Brooklyn.
On 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 appears, unbidden, to direct the way forward for his widow and his unborn child.
We begin deep inside Catholic Brooklyn, in the early part of the twentieth century. Decorum, superstition, and shame collude to erase the man's brief existence. Yet his suicide, although never spoken of, reverberates through many lives and over the decades testing the limits and the demands of love and sacrifice, of forgiveness and forgetfulness, even through multiple generations.
The characters we meet - from Sally, the unborn baby at the beginning of the audiobook who becomes the center of the story, to the nuns whose personalities we come to know and love, to the neighborhood families with whose lives they are entwined - are all rendered with extraordinary sympathy and McDermott's trademark lucidity and intelligence. Alice McDermott's The Ninth Hour is a crowning achievement by one of the premiere writers at work in America today, and the audio edition is truly unforgettable.
©2017 Alice McDermott (P)2017 Macmillan AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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Story
Haiti, 1991. When a violent coup d’état leads to the fall of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, American expat Matt Amaker is forced to abandon his idyllic, beachfront scuba business. With the rise of a brutal military dictatorship and an international embargo threatening to destroy even the country’s most powerful players, some are looking to gain an advantage in the chaos–and others are just looking to make it through another day.
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Brilliant Novel about US Policy & its Effects
- By Jason on 10-08-23
By: Ben Fountain
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The Daughters of Temperance Hobbs
- A Novel
- By: Katherine Howe
- Narrated by: Barrie Kreinik
- Length: 11 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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Connie Goodwin is an expert on America’s fractured past with witchcraft. A young, tenure-track professor in Boston, she’s earned career success by studying the history of magic in colonial America - especially women’s home recipes and medicines - and by exposing society's threats against women fluent in those skills. But beyond her studies, Connie harbors a secret: She is the direct descendant of a woman tried as a witch in Salem, an ancestor whose abilities were far more magical than the historical record shows.
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Good!
- By CKD on 07-24-19
By: Katherine Howe
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Someone
- A Novel
- By: Alice McDermott
- Narrated by: Kate Reading
- Length: 7 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
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An ordinary life—its sharp pains and unexpected joys, its bursts of clarity and moments of confusion—lived by an ordinary woman: this is the subject of Someone, Alice McDermott's extraordinary return, seven years after the publication of After This. Scattered recollections—of childhood, adolescence, motherhood, old age—come together in this transformative narrative, stitched into a vibrant whole by McDermott's deft, lyrical voice.
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Each word chosen like a jewel
- By Annie M. on 10-27-13
By: Alice McDermott
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10:04
- By: Ben Lerner
- Narrated by: Eric Michael Summerer
- Length: 7 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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In the last year, the narrator of 10:04 has enjoyed unexpected literary success, has been diagnosed with a potentially fatal heart condition, and has been asked by his best friend to help her conceive a child, despite his dating a rising star in the visual arts. In a New York of increasingly frequent super storms and political unrest, he must reckon with his biological mortality, the possibility of a literary afterlife, and the prospect of (unconventional) fatherhood in a city that might soon be under water.
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A novel worth reading
- By Bradley Paul Valentine on 01-29-15
By: Ben Lerner
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The Shadow Land
- A Novel
- By: Elizabeth Kostova
- Narrated by: Barrie Kreinik
- Length: 18 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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A young American woman, Alexandra Boyd, has traveled to Sofia, Bulgaria, hoping that life abroad will salve the wounds left by the loss of her beloved brother. Soon after arriving in this elegant East European city, however, she helps an elderly couple into a taxi - and realizes too late that she has accidentally kept one of their bags. Inside she finds an ornately carved wooden box engraved with a name: Stoyan Lazarov. Raising the hinged lid, she discovers that she is holding an urn filled with human ashes.
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Mysterious and Beautiful
- By Mel on 04-23-17
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Wolf at the Table
- By: Adam Rapp
- Narrated by: Paul Sparks
- Length: 15 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
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As late summer 1951 descends on Elmira, New York, Myra Larkin, thirteen, the oldest child of a large Catholic family, meets a young man she believes to be Mickey Mantle. He chats her up at a local diner and gives her a ride home. The matter consumes her until later that night, when a triple homicide occurs just down the street, opening a specter of violence that will haunt the Larkins for half a century.
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extraordinary writing.
- By michelle martinez on 05-23-24
By: Adam Rapp
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The Two-Family House
- A Novel
- By: Linda Cohen Loigman
- Narrated by: Barrie Kreinik
- Length: 8 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
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Brooklyn, 1947: In the midst of a blizzard, in a two-family brownstone, two babies are born minutes apart to two women. They are sisters by marriage, with an impenetrable bond forged before and during that dramatic night; but as the years progress, small cracks start to appear, and their once deep friendship begins to unravel. No one knows why, and no one can stop it. One misguided choice; one moment of tragedy. Heartbreak wars with happiness and almost but not quite wins.
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A Two Family Saga
- By Sara on 08-17-17
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The Story of Arthur Truluv
- A Novel
- By: Elizabeth Berg
- Narrated by: Elizabeth Berg
- Length: 6 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
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Three people find their way back from loss and loneliness to a different kind of belonging in this deeply moving novel. Arthur, an old widower struggling to overcome his grief, meets Maddy, a troubled teenage girl who avoids school by hiding out where Arthur goes every day for lunch. The two strike up a friendship that draws them out of isolation.
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Sickly Sweet
- By Amazon Customer on 01-19-18
By: Elizabeth Berg
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54 Miles
- A Novel
- By: Leonard Pitts Jr.
- Narrated by: Leonard Pitts Jr.
- Length: 12 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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Young Adam, who has been raised in Harlem by his white father, George, and Black mother, Thelma, goes back to his parents' home state of Alabama to participate in the voting rights campaign, only to be brutalized in the Bloody Sunday melee. He is still recovering from this when he is struck a heavy emotional blow, learning for the first time—and in the cruelest way imaginable—of a family secret that sends him spiraling and plunging further into danger. To save him, and any hope for their relationship, Thelma is drawn back, for the first time in twenty years, to the South.
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This Wrecked Me!
- By Sandra W. on 03-01-25
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Black Butterflies
- A Novel
- By: Priscilla Morris
- Narrated by: Rachel Atkins, Priscilla Morris
- Length: 6 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
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Sarajevo, spring 1992. Each night, nationalist gangs erect makeshift barricades, splitting the city into ethnic enclaves. Each morning, the people who live there—whether Muslim, Croat, or Serb—push the barriers aside. When violence erupts and becomes, finally, unavoidable, Zora, an artist and teacher, sends her husband and elderly mother to safety in England. She stays behind, reluctant to believe that hostilities will last more than a few weeks. As the city falls under siege, everything she loves about her home is laid to waste, black ashes floating over the rooftops.
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Beautiful prose -simple story
- By Cco on 02-10-25
By: Priscilla Morris
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An Unnecessary Woman
- By: Rabih Alameddine
- Narrated by: Suzanne Toren
- Length: 10 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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Aaliya Saleh lives alone in her Beirut apartment, surrounded by stockpiles of books. Godless, fatherless, childless, and divorced, Aaliya is her family's "unnecessary appendage." Every year, she translates a new favorite book into Arabic, then stows it away. The 37 books that Aaliya has translated over her lifetime have never been read by anyone. In this breathtaking portrait of a reclusive woman's late-life crisis, listeners follow Aaliya's digressive mind as it ricochets across visions of past and present Beirut.
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Tales of a Literary Snob
- By Ilana on 02-14-14
By: Rabih Alameddine
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Praiseworthy
- By: Alexis Wright
- Narrated by: Jacqui Katona
- Length: 36 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
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In a small town in the north of Australia, a mysterious cloud heralds both an ecological catastrophe and a gathering of the ancestors. A crazed visionary looks to donkeys to solve the global climate crisis and the economic dependency of the Aboriginal people. His wife, seeking solace from his madness, follows the dance of butterflies and scours the internet to find out how her Aboriginal/Chinese family could be repatriated to China. One of their sons, named Aboriginal Sovereignty, is determined to commit suicide.
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Beautiful, powerful book full of poetry
- By Guy on 11-11-24
By: Alexis Wright
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Charming Billy
- A Novel
- By: Alice McDermott
- Narrated by: Barrie Kreinik
- Length: 8 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
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Alice McDermott's striking audiobook, Charming Billy, is a study of the lies that bind and the weight of familial love, of the way good intentions can be as destructive as the truth they were meant to hide. Billy Lynch's family and friends have gathered to comfort his widow, and to pay their respects to one of the last great romantics. As they trade tales of his famous humor, immense charm, and consuming sorrow, a complex portrait emerges of an enigmatic man, a loyal friend, a beloved husband, an incurable alcoholic.
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What a graceful novel!
- By Robert Mooneyhan on 04-07-21
By: Alice McDermott
Glorious
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Depressing as hell
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delightful writing
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Not what I expected
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Her characters are Are both ordinary and extraordinary. Amazing story simply said.
Excellent in every way!
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9 long hours
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Rich and character development
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Haunting
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Beautifully written
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Christian Literature
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