Charming Billy (COLLECTOR'S FIRST PRINTING in Specially Prepared Archival Brodart)

McDermott, Alice

ISBN 10: 0374120803 / ISBN 13: 9780374120801

Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997

About this Item

Dust jacket in highest archival grade mylar Brodart, SPECIALLY PREPARED so that the die-cut window on front cover is still visible through protector (AN IMPORTANT FEATURE TO PROPERLY PRESENT A COLLECTIBLE COPY OF THIS BOOK). NO remainder marks, NOT price clipped, NEVER read. National Book Award Winner. Carefully packaged to prevent shipping damage.

Seller Inventory # 200201

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Charming Billy (COLLECTOR'S FIRST PRINTING in Specially Prepared Archival Brodart)
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Publication Date: 1997
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0374120803
• ISBN 13: 9780374120801
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: 1st Edition
• Condition: As New
• Dust Jacket Condition: As New
• Seller catalogs:
  • Modern First Editions
  • Award Winning Fiction

About this title

Synopsis

Alice McDermott tells the story of Billy Lynch within the complex matrix of a tightly knit Irish American community, in a voice that is resonant and full of deep feeling. Charming Billy is a masterpiece about the unbreakable bonds of memory and desire.

Reviews

McDermott (At Weddings and Wakes, 1992, etc.) extends her view of Irish-American life with this gentle portrait of an alcoholic freshly dead from drink, and of the family he leaves behind to reveal and remember. Everyone at the wake agreed that Billy Lynch was a fine man- -when sober. But they also knew something of his pain, born from the long-ago death of his fianc‚ just before she was to come back to Brooklyn after a trip to Ireland. Only his cousin and best friend Dennis, though, knew the whole story: Eva didn't die, but she did marry her Irish love--a fact he concealed from Billy for 30 years, not knowing that Billy would mourn what might have been for the rest of his life, even after he met and married the gentle, love-struck Maeve. Then, in Ireland in 1975, to take The Pledge after years of hard drinking, Billy learned the truth by chancing to meet Eva as he was on his way to visit her grave--and promptly took back his Pledge. As he had in times previous, Dennis helped Maeve through the years that followed, answering Billy's wee-hours phone calls and bringing him to bed whenever he'd passed out, even as Dennis's own wife sickened of cancer and died. And now Dennis's daughter, grown with children of her own, has come home to support him after Billy was found dying in the street--just as Dennis supported Billy and Maeve, and as his father before him supported countless penniless Irish relations as they made the leap across the Atlantic to a new life. It's this daughter who puts the pieces of Billy's sad but profoundly loyal existence together, mingling them with her father's and her own in a special way that leaves her well prepared for the turn of events to come. A softly resonant and nostalgic tale told so masterfully, so movingly, that it seems to distill a human essence on virtually every page. -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

When Billy, the glue of a tight Irish community in New York, dies as a result of lifelong alcohol abuse, mourners gather around roast beef and green bean amandine to tell tales and ruminate on his struggle for happiness after he lost his first love, Eva. With carefully drawn character studies and gentle probing, McDermott, who won the National Book Award for this work, masterfully weaves a subtle but tenacious web of relationships to explore the devastation of alcoholism, the loss of innocence, the daily practice of love, and the redeeming unity of family and friendship.
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