Alice McDERMOTT ... After This (2006)

ALICE McDERMOTT is and has been a very consistent novelist. Writing in the tradition of Penelope Fitzgerald and Mary Gordon, all her family stories make compelling reading. If you have not read any of her work, you might like to try her latest, After This (2006), surely one of the better novels of 2006, and Charming Billy (1998). Michiko Kakutani in the New York Times calls After This “an affecting meditation on the consolations and discontents of family life—the centripetal and centrifugal forces that bind husbands and wives, parents and children together and fling them ineluctably apart.” More dramas about Irish Catholic families on Long Island with her trademark intelligence and sly wit.

Bibliography
McDERMOTT Alice [1953-] Novelist. Born in Brooklyn, New York, U.S. Novels After This (2006); Child of My Heart (2002); Charming Billy (1998: winner of the 1998 National Book Award; shortlisted for the 2000 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award; longlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction); At Weddings and Wakes (1992: shortlisted for the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction); That Night (1987: shortlisted for the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, the 1988 National Book Award, and the 1988 Los Angeles Times Book Prize); A Bigamist’s Daughter (1982)