Songs in Ordinary Time: A Novel - Softcover

Morris, Mary McGarry

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1504048113 ISBN 13: 9781504048118

Publisher: Open Road Media, 2017

Synopsis

This New York Times bestseller of a troubled family in 1960s Vermont is “teeming with incident and characters, often foolish, even nasty, but always alive” (The New Yorker).

It is the summer of 1960 in Atkinson, Vermont. With no help from her alcoholic ex-husband, Marie Fermoyle is raising three children on the edge of poverty. Her seventeen-year-old daughter, Alice, is becoming emotionally involved with a local priest in a staunchly Catholic town that disapproves of Marie’s divorce. Alice’s brother Norm is a hotheaded sixteen-year-old, and twelve-year-old Benjy is isolated and full of anxieties, looking with yearning at the Klubocks next door, who seem to live an orderly, peaceful life much unlike his own family’s.
 
Now, Marie has met a new man: Omar Duvall, who talks about opportunities and riches but so far seems only to sponge off the Fermoyles. A lonely, desperate single mother like Marie is easy prey for con men, but she resists the temptation to doubt him. Young Benjy, though, may eventually reveal a disturbing secret that could shatter all her hopes.
 
A portrait of a family as well as a town and its secrets, Songs in Ordinary Time is “a gritty, beautifully crafted novel rich in wisdom and suspense” (The Miami Herald). An Oprah’s Book Club selection from an author nominated for the National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award, it is “extraordinary . . . a deeply satisfying story” (USA Today).

About this title

Review:

“A novel large enough to live in, a sprawling piece about small-town life.” —Booklist
 
“Deep and thick as a long, hot summer . . . The narrative of a town reminiscent of the collective ache of The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter.” —The Boston Globe
 
“Morris can depict society’s outsiders—people with bleak presents and no futures—with rare understanding and compassion. . . . Morris weaves the taut strands of her plot with remarkable skill, revealing how people with no financial security and few mental resources are controlled by others more feral and more dangerous. Throughout, she maintains the suspense . . . building to a heartstopping denouement, yet remaining strictly observant of the minutiae of daily life that give the book its honesty and pathos.”—Publishers Weekly
 
“In her graphic, stiletto chapters, Mary McGarry Morris is a cross between Elizabeth Gaskell and David Lynch.” —Minneapolis Star-Tribune
 
“Morris’s powers of observation create a depth that makes the characters’ dilemmas seem as real as the reader’s own. The book is alternately touching and sinister, but it resonates with authenticity.” —The San Diego Tribune
 

About the Author:

Mary McGarry Morris grew up in Vermont and now lives on the North Shore in Massachusetts. Her first novel, Vanished, was published in 1988 and was nominated for the National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award. A Dangerous Woman (1991) was chosen by Time magazine as one of the “Five Best Novels of the Year” and was made into a motion picture starring Debra Winger, Barbara Hershey, and Gabriel Byrne. Songs in Ordinary Time (1995) was an Oprah’s Book Club selection, which propelled it to the top of the New York Times bestseller list for many weeks, and it was adapted for a TV movie starring Sissy Spacek and Beau Bridges. Morris’s other highly acclaimed works include the novels Fiona Range (2000), A Hole in the Universe (2004), The Lost Mother (2005), The Last Secret (2009), and Light from a Distant Star (2011), as well as the play MTL: The Insanity File.
 

About this edition

• Publisher: Open Road Media
• Publication date: 2017
• ISBN 10: 1504048113
• ISBN 13: 9781504048118
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 728