Alice McDermott – författare

The late Billy Lynch's family and friends gather at a small bar and grill in the Bronx to remember better times. His widow, Maeve, is there and everyone admires the way she is holding up, just as they always admired the way she cared for Billy after the alcohol had ruined him. But one cannot think of Billy without saying at some point, 'There was that girl'. On Long Island one summer years ago, Billy fell in love with a beautiful Irish girl working for a wealthy Park Avenue family. Billy wanted to marry Eva, but then she went back to Ireland. And then Billy's cousin Dennis had to break the terrible news: Eva had died of pneumonia. Billy never got over it. Anybody who knew him would tell you so. Billy began courting Maeve not long after, but for the rest of their lives, he, she and Dennis shared a hidden, twisted grief.

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.

Alice McDermott's masterful novel is a portrait of a working-class American family living through the tumultuous middle decades of the twentieth century. While Michael and Annie Keane taste the alternately intoxicating and bitter fruits of the sexual revolution, their older brother, Jacob, finds himself on the way to Vietnam. Clare, the youngest child, seeks to maintain an almost saintly innocence. As their parents, John and Mary, struggle to uphold the family's framework, the four siblings are destined to experience the challenges and liberties of the 1960s. With McDermott's inimitable understanding and grace, "After This" captures the joy, sorrow, anger and love that underpin, and undermine, what it is to be a family.

The quietest life can resonate the longest. A beautiful, bittersweet masterpiece about a remarkable journey of the heartSHORTLISTED FOR THE INTERNATIONAL IMPAC DUBLIN LITERARY AWARD 2015LONGLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD 2014Someone begins on the stoop of a Brooklyn apartment building where Marie is waiting for her father to come home from work. It is the 1920s and in her Irish-American enclave the stories of her neighbours unfold before her short-sighted eyes.As the years pass Marie’s own history plays out against the backdrop of a changing world. This is the story of one life in all its devastating pains and unexpected joys; its bursts of brilliant clarity and moments of profound confusion.Fragments of a curious childhood, of adolescent sexual awakenings, of motherhood and, finally, old age are pieced together in this resonant tale of an unremarkable, unforgettable woman.______________________'A beautiful book' Sunday Telegraph'Masterful' Irish Times'Exquisite' New York Times

* THE TOP 10 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER *'One of the finest contemporary novels I've read ... A moral masterpiece' ANN PATCHETT'Her writing has a luminous kind of clarity, a grace and scope that fills me with wonder' RACHEL JOYCE'Damning and dazzling ... The story of a Vietnam we never got in history class' OPRAH DAILY-----------------You have no idea what it was like. For us. The women, I mean. The wives. 1963. Saigon. Tricia is a shy newlywed, married to a rising attorney working for US Navy intelligence. Charlene is a practiced corporate spouse and mother of three, a beauty and a bully. The two women form a wary alliance as they struggle to balance the pressure to be respectable wives for their ambitious husbands, with their own dubious impulses to “do good” for the people of Vietnam. Sixty years later, Charlene’s daughter, spurred by an encounter with an aging Vietnam veteran, reaches out to Tricia. Together, they look back at their time in Saigon, discovering how their lives as women on the periphery — of politics, of history, of war, of their husbands’ convictions — have been shaped and burdened by the unintended consequences of America’s tragic interference in Southeast Asia.Exploring the disaster of the Vietnam War through the lives built by American wives in 1960s Saigon, this is a virtuosic novel about folly and grace, obligation, sacrifice and the quest for absolution in a broken world.