Someone

"Alice McDermott’s latest, quietly luminous novel is near-perfect, an extraordinary book about an absolutely ordinary Irish-American woman who grows up in Brooklyn, marries a good man, raises four children and lives long enough to survive the loss of parents, brother and husband. Out of this quotidian stuff McDermott addresses issues of time, mortality, family and vision and composes a moving picture of a life lived small but full."

"Alice McDermott's "Someone." At the start of the novel, a sweet, hopeful girl dies by falling down the cellar stairs... the author's gentle manipulation of the reader's emotions made me gulp with the discovery that I'd been thinking of the dead girl all along."