Charming Billy: A Novel [Paperback]

Winner of the National Book Award and aNew York Timesbestseller,Charming Billyis Alice McDermotts masterpiece (NPR).

In a small bar somewhere in the Bronx, a funeral party has gathered to honor Billy Lynch. Through the night, his friends and family will weave together the tale of a husband, lover, dreamer, and storyteller, but also that of a hopeless drunk whose immense charm was but a veil over a lifetime of secrets and all-consuming sorrow. As they comfort his widow, the gentle Maeve, they remember as well his first love, Eva, who died of pneumonia, and whose ghost haunted his marriage and drove him to the bottle. Who is truly responsible for Billys life and death, and what does it mean to mythologize a friends suffering?

Beautifully written and teeming with fine portraits of Irish-American life in New York,Charming Billyis Alice McDermotts masterful and beloved novel about how a community can pin its dreams to one man, and how good intentions can be as destructive as the truth they were meant to hide.

Alice McDermottis the author of several novels, includingThe Ninth Hour;Someone;After This;Charming Billy, winner of the 1998 National Book Award;At Weddings and Wakes; andThat Nightall published by FSG.That Night, At Weddings and Wakes, andAfter Thiswere finalists for the Pulitzer Prize. Her stories and essays have appeared inThe New York Times,The Washington Post,The New Yorker,Harpers Magazine, and other publications. For more than two decades she was the Richard A. Macksey Professor for Distinguished Teaching in the Humanities at Johns Hopkins University and a member of the faculty at the Sewanee Writers Conference. McDermott lives with her family outside Washington, D.C.

This is fiction as good as it gets. USA Today

A luminous and affecting novel. Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
lÃ-