Absolution

Alice McDermott has always been one of our greatest writers but here she exceeds every expectation -- Ann Patchett McDermott delivers another elegantly written, immaculately conceived novel that immerses the reader in the contradictions and moral ambiguities of the human heart. McDermott is a storyteller who aims for the stars. Absolution takes us there, by way of wartime Saigon, and with a powerful reminder that good intentions can have consequences that jerk us awake over a lifetime. What a splendid, compelling book this is -- Tim O'Brien, author of THE THINGS THEY CARRIED Praise for Alice McDermott: 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 * The Times * Alongside her marvellous descriptions of unbeautiful bodies is an intense lyricism … McDermott is so attentive to atmospheres, glances, the quietest moments that provoke profound shifts in a character’s world * Guardian * A masterful American writer * Mail on Sunday * McDermott depicts with sensuous intensity the texture of lives lived and the intersection of faith and sin… marked by small, but transformative, acts of grace * Daily Mail * She is a poet of corporeal description … It’s the way she marries the spirit to the physical world that make her work transcendent * Time Magazine * Superb and masterful … Powerful and sublime ... Her sentences burn on the page * Washington Post * McDermott is a virtuoso of language and image, allusion and reflection, reference and symbol ... Reminds us of the pleasures of literary fiction and its power to illuminate lives and worlds * Boston Globe *