Someone

longlisted for the National Book Awards

‘At seven, I was a shy child, and comical-looking, with a round flat face and black slits for eyes, thick glasses, black bangs, a straight and serious mouth – a little girl cartoon.
With my heart pinned to my father’s sleeve’

Someone 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. There is war-blinded Billy Corrigan and foolish, ill-fated Pegeen – and her parents’ legendary Syrian-Irish marriage – the terrifying Big Lucy, and the ever-present Sisters of Charity from the convent down the road.

As the years pass Marie’s own history plays out against the backdrop of a changing world. Her older brother Gabe leaves for the seminary to study for the priesthood, his faith destined to be tested to breaking point. Marie experiences first love – and first heartbreak – marriage and motherhood, and discovers how time can reveal us all to be fools and dreamers, blinded in one way or another by hope, loss or the exigencies of life and love.

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 story of an unremarkable, unforgettable woman.

Alice McDermott is the author of seven novels including After This, Child of My Heart, Charming Billy (winner of the 1998 National Book Award), At Weddings and Wakes, That Night and A Bigamist’s Daughter. She has been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize three times and has also been nominated for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award. She lives with her family outside Washington DC.

“One of the author’s most trenchant explorations into the heart and soul of the 20th-century Irish-American family … [an] elegy to a vanished world” – Kirkus (starred review)

“Sublime ... McDermott's simple prose is full of poetic distillations that capture a mood or a moment just so, and it all comes together in a radiant portrait of family life” – Daily Mail

“The triumph of Alice McDermott's After This is its evocation of childhood ... Written with a remarkable attentiveness ... McDermott's unshowy, succinct sentences summon up the flavour of the past when it was new” – Sunday Times

“McDermott has laid bare the nerve centre of a family, and located an enduring grace in the constraints and confusion of day-to-day life” – Times Literary Supplement