On a dim winter afternoon, a young Irish immigrant opens the gas taps in his Brooklyn tenement. He is determined to prove--to the subway bosses who have recently fired him, to his badgering, pregnant wife--"that the hours of his life belong to himself alone." In the aftermath of the fire that follows, Sister St. Savior, an aging nun, a Little Sister of the Sick Poor, appears, unbidden, to direct the way forward for his widow and his unborn child....

For Sean Corrigan the past is simply what happened yesterday, until his twenty-first birthday, when he is given a journal left him by his father's brother Michael-a man he had not known existed. The journal, kept after his uncle fled from New York City to Ireland to escape prosecution for a murder he did not commit, draws Sean into a hunt for the truth about Michael's fate. Sean too leaves New York for Ireland, where he is caught up in the lives...

Reluctantly embroiled in a 1840s dispute between a corrupt Tammany Hall leader and an arsonist with an agenda, Copper Star Timothy Wilde finds his investigation challenged by his brother's decision to run for public office.

"Billy Lynch's family and friends have gathered to comfort his widow, and to pay their respects to one of the last great romantics. As they trade tales of his famous humor, immense charm, and consuming sorrow, a complex portrait emerges of an enigmatic man, a loyal friend, a beloved husband, an incurable alcoholic. Alice McDermott's striking novel, Charming Billy, is a study of the lies that bind and the weight of familial love, of the way good intentions...

"A vibrant, intimate, hypnotic portrait of one woman's life, from an important new writer. Tess Lohan is the kind of woman that we meet and fail to notice every day. A single mother. A nurse. A quiet woman, who nonetheless feels things acutely--a woman with tumultuous emotions and few people to share them with. Academy Street is Mary Costello's luminous portrait of a whole life. It follows Tess from her girlhood in western Ireland through her relocation...

A tough Irish cop. A prostitute. A massive cover-up that stretches to the highest levels of law enforcement... and its fatal impact on three generations of a New York police family. Harlem, just before midnight. A New York Police Department cop and his partner pull up in front of a tenement. A short while later, Sergeant Brian O'Malley is dead from a stab wound to the jugular, and a prostitute has fallen down an airshaft to oblivion.   A few years...

"Driven from Ireland during the potato famine in 1851, Protestant Victoria MacPherson and Catholic Maeve O'Reilly find themselves thrown together aboard a Manhattan-bound ship. They arrive in New York City with only a small purse of silver and the promise that Maeve's brother will find them there. But he's nowhere to be found and a scam artist cons the girls out of their savings, leaving the two destitute in the tenements of Lower Manhattan. As the...