The Ninth Hour

This book is about nuns, but don’t be fooled into thinking it’s boring: this story begins with a suicide and ends with another astonishing blow that I won’t spoil. Master of the human condition, Alice McDermott brings us an incredible book about The Little Nursing Sisters of the Sick Poor in Brooklyn. This novel is a salve for its readers, encompassing love in its many forms (forbidden and otherwise), sin, guilt, depression, friendship, and hungers of the body and the soul.