The Ninth Hour

A magnificent new novel 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 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...