Sally, having grown up among nuns, imagines she has a vocation.

The intimacies are more gestured towards than explained, in keeping with this world in which so much is unspoken. Among the book’s most beautiful passages are those that concern the illicit sensuality she enjoys and her frank refusal of shame. The author upends our expectations by not turning Annie into an arid, joyless widow. At the story’s heart are Annie and her daughter, Sally, born after Jim’s death. McDermott uses Jim’s death to trace the way the acts of our lives, and the manner of our demise, shape the people we leave behind. Catholicism, as rendered by McDermott, can be a cold, hard place, but within its world there are individuals of clear-sightedness and compassion. Sister St Saviour – pragmatic, unsentimental, class-conscious – attempts to cover up the cause of death so Jim can be buried in consecrated ground, and gets Annie a job in the convent laundry. This being Irish Catholic Brooklyn in the early 20th century, the nuns are not slow to appear. Jim, a young railway employee fired from his job, turns on the gas in the tenement he shares with his pregnant wife, Annie. So US author Alice McDermott’s eighth novel – in which there are several nuns, each with a personality, each operating in a world of moral compromise – feels faintly, paradoxically, subversive. A commission of investigation is looking into abuses in Ireland’s mother-and-baby homes more mundanely, nuns can seem cloistered, even when they are not, or they are presented as figures of fun. While they haven’t suffered quite the fall from grace that priests have, the press of late hasn’t been good. I t seems daring, in this day and age, to fill a novel with Catholic nuns.

The Ninth Hour by Alice McDermott