On a dim winter afternoon, a young Irish immigrant opens the gas taps in his Brooklyn tenement.
He is determined to prove--to the subway bosses who have recently fired him, to his badgering, pregnant wife--that the hours of his life belong to himself alone.
In the aftermath of the fire that follows, Sister St.
Savior, an aging nun, a Little Sister of the Sick Poor, appears, unbidden, to direct the way forward for his widow and his unborn child.
In Catholic Brooklyn, in the early part.
Farrar Straus And Giroux The ninth hour, hardcover/alice mcdermott
