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Alice McDermott has developed a reputation as the premier chronicler of the ordinary lives of Irish Catholic New Yorkers in the twentieth century. Though reluctant to be categorized as either an Irish American writer or a Catholic writer, McDermott expla...

By Alice McDermott. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998, 280 pp., $21.00 hardcover. Each of these novels examines the evolution of one special friendship within an extended family over a lifetime. Elizabeth Cox focuses on the shifting relationship between a black...

Charming Billy by Alice McDermott. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 280 pp., $22.00. This beautifully narrated novel of lost love is also an accurate rendering of what it was like for the poor Irish Catholics who immigrated to this country in the early 1900s....