That Night: A Novel [Paperback]

InThat Night,New York Timesbestselling author Alice McDermott, has taken a suburban teenage romance and pregnancy and infused it with the power, the ominousness, and the star-crossed romanticism of a contemporary Romeo and Juliet (Chicago Tribune)

A Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award

It is high summer, the early 1960s. Sheryl and Rick, two Long Island teenagers, share an intense, all-consuming love. But Sheryls widowed mother steps between them, and one moonlit night Rick and a gang of hoodlums descend upon her quiet neighborhood.

That night, driven by Ricks determination to reclaim Sheryl, the young men provoke a violent confrontation, and as fathers step forward to protect their turf, notions of innocence belonging to both sides of the brawl are fractured forever.

Alice McDermottsThat Nightis as carefully constructed as a poem, giving off a lustrous glow, and is poignant in the telling (People).

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.

1. What was the effect of the narrator's voice on your reading of these events? How might the novel have unfolded if it had been told from Rick's point of view?

2. In what way is Rick and SherylS™