Description
Book SynopsisThe quietest life can resonate the longest. A beautiful, bittersweet masterpiece about a remarkable journey of the heartSHORTLISTED FOR THE INTERNATIONAL IMPAC DUBLIN LITERARY AWARD 2015LONGLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD 2014Someone 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.As the years pass Marie's own history plays out against the backdrop of a changing world. This is the story of 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 tale of an unremarkable, unforgettable woman.
______________________''A beautiful book'' Sunday Telegraph
Trade Review
A beautiful book * Sunday Telegraph *
Masterful * Irish Times *
Exquisite …
Someone is a wonderfully modest title for such a fine-tuned, beautiful book filled with so much universal experience, such haunting imagery, such urgent matters of life and death *
New York Times *
It is easy to fall in love with Alice McDermott’s prose. Her endearing details and graceful sentences value the ordinary confusions of day-to-day lives *
TLS *
[McDermott]’s wisdom, gently hewn out of the stuff of every day, shines through this memorably atmospheric story’ *
The Times *
A shattering, century-spanning history of one apparently ordinary life … Told with characteristic care, force and economy *
Time Out *
Alice McDermott, one of the greatest chroniclers of Irish-American life … I was smitten by
Charming Billy,
Someone and, to a lesser extent,
Child of my Heart *
Irish Times *
