Alice McDermott
1) Absolution
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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...
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"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...
3) Someone
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"The story of a Brooklyn-born woman's life - her family, her neighborhood, her daily trials and triumphs - from childhood to old age"--Provided by the publisher.
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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, a Little Sister of the Sick Poor, appears, unbidden, to direct the way forward for his widow and his unborn child....
5) After this
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John and Mary Keane and their four children, Michael, Annie, Jacob, and Clare, battle the tumultuous political, social, and spiritual upheavals of the 1950s and 1960s.
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Fifteen-year-old Theresa's parents moved to Long Island to increase the odds that their exceptional daughter will attract a well-off husband. Meanwhile, this princess-in-waiting, who is every bit as shrewd as she is lovely, keeps herself busy during this eventful summer, her season of passage from girl to woman, by caring for her self-centered neighbors' woefully neglected pets and children. A young girl's astonishing, poignant first look into the...