by Alice McDermott (Author)
In That Night, New York Times bestselling 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 Sheryl's widowed mother steps between them, and one moonlit night Rick and a gang of hoodlums descend upon her quiet neighborhood. That night, driven by Rick's 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 McDermott's That Night "is as carefully constructed as a poem, giving off a lustrous glow, and is poignant in the telling" (People).Author Biography
Alice McDermott is the author of several novels, including The Ninth Hour; Someone; After This; Charming Billy, winner of the 1998 National Book Award; At Weddings and Wakes; and That Night--all published by FSG. That Night, At Weddings and Wakes, and After This were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize. Her stories and essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Yorker, Harper's 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.