Alice McDermott has 6 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 6 narrators, with an average listener rating of 2.5★ across 2 ratings. The most-rated is The Ninth Hour.
The Ninth Hour
Summary
"[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 Audio
Charming Billy
Summary
Program includes a bonus conversation between Alice McDermott and Matthew Thomas, New York Times best-selling author of the critically-acclaimed novel, We Are Not Ourselves. Celebrating the 20th anniversary with a brand new audiobook recording Winner of the 1998 National Book Award for Fiction 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.
©1998 Alice McDermott (P)2018 Macmillan Audio
At Wedding and Wakes
Summary
More than any other writer, Alice McDermott exposes the vein of poetry, of profound joy and pain that transforms everyday experience into the heroic and universal. At Weddings and Wakes tells the bittersweet, lovable, human story of an Irish-Catholic family on Long Island as seen through the eyes of two sisters and a brother. Weekly visits to Brooklyn usher the children into an airless world of memory, recrimination and eternal repartee. In the daily routines of family, they witness the ebb and flow of drama and melodrama, the cycles of dissatisfaction and recurring affection.
©1998 Alice McDermott (P)2009 Phoenix
Child of My Heart
Summary
In Alice McDermott's new work of fiction a woman recalls her bittersweet 15th summer. The beautiful child of older parents, raised on the eastern end of Long Island among the summer houses of the rich, Theresa is the town's most sough-after babysitter - cheerful, poised, an effortless storyteller, a wonder with children and animals. Among her charges this fateful summer is Daisy, her younger cousin, who has left a crowded working-class household in the city to spend a few quiet weeks in this bucolic place, under Theresa's benevolent eye. Theresa must cope with the challenges presented by the neighborhood's waiflike children, the tumultuous households of her employers, the mysteriously compelling attentions of an aging painter, and Daisy's fragility of body and spirit as she makes the perilous crossing into adulthood. McDermott's deeply etched rendering of all that happened that seemingly idyllic season explores the depths of everyday life with inimitable insight and grace.
©2002 Alice McDermott (P)2002 Audio Renaissance, a division of Holtzbrinck Publishers, LLC
Someone
Summary
A fully realized portrait of one woman’s life in all its complexity, by the National Book Award-winning author. 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. Our first glimpse of Marie is as a child: a girl in glasses waiting on a Brooklyn stoop for her beloved father to come home from work. A seemingly innocuous encounter with a young woman named Pegeen sets the bittersweet tone of this remarkable novel. Pegeen describes herself as an “amadan,” a fool; indeed, soon after her chat with Marie, Pegeen tumbles down her own basement stairs. The magic of McDermott’s novel lies in how it reveals us all as fools for this or that, in one way or another. Marie’s first heartbreak and her eventual marriage; her brother’s brief stint as a Catholic priest, subsequent loss of faith, and eventual breakdown; the Second World War; her parents’ deaths; the births and lives of Marie’s children; the changing world of her Irish-American enclave in Brooklyn - McDermott sketches all of it with sympathy and insight. Includes a bonus conversation between Alice McDermott and her editor, Jonathan Galassi.
©2013 Alice McDermott (P)2012 Macmillan Audio
After This
Summary
Alice McDermott's powerful new novel wittily captures the social, political and spiritual upheavals of the mid-20th century through the story of a family, and the changing world in which they live. While Michael and Annie Keane taste the alternately intoxicating and bitter first fruits of the sexual revolution, their older, more tentative brother lags behind, until he finds himself on the way to Vietnam. Meanwhile, Clare, the youngest child of their aging parents, seeks to maintain an almost saintly innocence. After This, alive with the passions and tragedies of a determining era in our history, portrays the clash of traditional, faith-bound life and modern freedom, while also capturing, with McDermott's inimitable understanding and grace, the joy, sorrow, anger, and love that underpin, and undermine, what it is to be a family.
©2006 Alice McDermott (P)2006 Audio Renaissance, a division of Holtzbrinck Publishers, LLC