The quietest life can resonate the longest. A beautiful, bittersweet masterpiece about a remarkable journey of the heart - longlisted for the National Book Award
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.
About the Author
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.
Industry Reviews
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 *