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

When the late Billy Lynch's relatives and friends gather together to keep his memory alive, stories are woven and memories relived detailing his life in the close Irish-American community and the intricate feelings that resurface. 75,000 first printing. Tour.

Review

Charming Billy is a devastating account of the power of longing and lies, love's tenacity and resignations hold. Even at his funeral party, Billy Lynch's life remains up for debate. This soft-spoken, poetry lover's drinking was as legendary among his Queens', New York, family and friends as was his disappointment in love. But the latter, as his cousin Dennis knows, "was, after all, yet another sweet romance to preserve." After World War II, both young men had spent one sun-swept week on Long Island, renovating a house and falling in with two Irish sisters--nannies to a wealthy family--"marvelling, marvelling still, that this Eden was here, at the other end of the same island on which they had spent their lives." By the end of their idyll, Billy and Eva were engaged, though she was set to return to County Wicklow. Determined to earn enough money to bring her, her family, and if necessary her entire village back to the US, Billy took two jobs, one of which would indenture him for years. But despite the money he sent, Eva never returned, and then was suddenly dead of pneumonia. The true tragedy is that she had simply kept her fare and married someone else--a secret Dennis keeps for the next 30 years as he watches Billy fall into a loveless marriage and the self-administered anaesthesia of alcohol. Alice McDermott's quiet, striking novel is a study of the lies that bind and the weight of familial wishes. She seems far less interested in the shock of revelation than in her characters' power to live through personal disaster. As Dennis's daughter pieces together Billy's real history, she also learns of the accommodations her own family had long made--and discovers that good intentions can be as destructive as the truth they mean to hide. Amazon.com