Bethel’s Byrd’s Books Welcomes Celebrated Author, Alice McDermott

Alice McDermott Discusses New Book, Absolution, on Zoom

“After a long run of thirty years, you get to the point where you say, ‘These are my concerns,’ It’s not so much that is what I set out to claim - it is a kind of a refrain.”

— Alice McDermott

American women - American wives - have been mostly minor characters in the literature of the Vietnam War, but in Alice McDermott’s book, Absolution, they take center stage. On Wednesday, November 29th, at 7:00pm, the author will join Bethel’s Byrd’s Books on Zoom for a highly anticipated reading and discussion of her new novel and of women on the periphery.

“Alice was one of our authors on our Write America series, curated by Roger Rosenblatt, and we are delighted to welcome her back,” says Byrd’s Books’ owner, Alice Hutchinson. Signed copies of Absolution are now available for purchase at Byrd’s Books.

Registration for this event is required. To reserve your spot, purchase the book, and get the Zoom link, go to Events at ByrdsBooks.com 

Absolution begins in Saigon in 1963, where two women form a wary alliance as they balance the era's mandate to be "helpmeets" to their ambitious husbands with their own impulse to "do good" for the people of Vietnam. Sixty years later, it explores the lives they’ve lived, shaped and burdened by the same sort of unintended consequences that followed America's tragic interference in Southeast Asia.

The novel is Alice McDermott’s ninth novel, in a list that includes Charming Billy, winner of the National Book Award, and That Night, At Weddings and Wakes, and After This, which 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. The Richard A. Macksey Professor of the Humanities at Johns Hopkins University, Alice McDermott was inducted into the New York State Writers Hall of Fame in 2013.

Byrd’s Books is located at 178 Greenwood Avenue, across from the Bethel Public Library. Byrd’s Books hours are Tuesdays to Saturdays 10:00am to 6:00pm, Sunday’s 12:00 noon to 4;00pm, Closed Mondays. Author discussions and Book Group gatherings are regularly added to Byrd’s Books’ calendar of events. For directions to the store or more info, call Byrd’s Books at 203-730-2973 or visit ByrdsBooks.com, where you’ll also find the shop’s expanded catalog of books.