At Weddings and Wakes
Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize
Lucy Dailey leaves suburbia twice a week with her three children in tow, returning to the Brooklyn home where she grew up, and where her stepmother and unmarried sisters still live. The children quietly observe Aunt Veronica, who drowns her sorrows in drink. Aunt Agnes, a caustic career woman, and finally Aunt May, the ex-nun, blossoming with a late and unexpected love, dutifully absorbing the legacy of their less-than-perfect family. Alice McDermott beautifully evokes three generations of an Irish-American family in this "haunting and masterly work of literary art" (The Wall Street Journal).
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Reviews
“As rendered through Ms. McDermott's rich, supple prose, and infused with her quiet emotional wisdom, the story of these three children and their family assumes a kind of mythic resonance: it becomes a parable about all families and all families' encounters with love, mortality, and sorrow.”—The New York Times
"A haunted, troubled, beautifully articulated journey into the past."—San Francisco Chronicle
"It's hard to lift your eyes at the end of the book... you'll find yourself reading every word of Alice McDermott's new novel, not because it's complicated but because such wonderful things happen deep inside the senteces."—Newsweek
"A brilliant, highly complex, extraordinary piece of fiction and a triumph for its author."—The Chicago Tribune
"A haunting and masterly work of literary art."—The Wall Street Journal