Alice McDermott is the author of seven novels including After This, Child of My Heart, Charming Billy (winner of the 1998 National Book Award), At Weddings and Wakes, That Night and A Bigamist's Daughter. She has been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize three times and has also been nominated for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award. She lives with her family outside Washington DC.

SHORTLISTED FOR THE INTERNATIONAL IMPAC DUBLIN LITERARY AWARD 2015

LONGLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD 2014

Someone begins on the stoop of a Brooklyn apartment building where Marie is waiting for her father to come home from work. It is the 1920s and in her Irish-American enclave the stories of her neighbours unfold before her short-sighted eyes. As the years pass Marie's own history plays out against the backdrop of a changing world. This is the story of one life in all its devastating pains and unexpected joys; its bursts of brilliant clarity and moments of profound confusion. Fragments of a curious childhood, of adolescent sexual awakenings, of motherhood and, finally, old age are pieced together in this resonant tale of an unremarkable, unforgettable woman.

A beautiful book

Masterful

Exquisite . Someone is a wonderfully modest title for such a fine-tuned, beautiful book filled with so much universal experience, such haunting imagery, such urgent matters of life and death

It is easy to fall in love with Alice McDermott's prose. Her endearing details and graceful sentences value the ordinary confusions of day-to-day lives

[McDermott]'s wisdom, gently hewn out of the stuff of every day, shines through this memorably atmospheric story'

A shattering, century-spanning history of one apparently ordinary life . Told with characteristic care, force and economy

Alice McDermott, one of the greatest chroniclers of Irish-American life . I was smitten by Charming Billy, Someone and, to a lesser extent, Child of my Heart