Someone: A Novel Audiobook

Quotes

• “In beautifully understated language and an unerringly nimble free-associative narrative, McDermott weaves such an intimate, complex life study that we feel each of Marie’s accumulating losses until they become staggering.”

  — Elle

• “[Someone is] filled with subtle insights and abundant empathy and grace.”

  — USA Today

• “A remarkable portrait of an unremarkable life…as Marie, an obsessive observer of people, looks back over her life and tries to decipher the motivations, desires, and private feelings of those she has encountered. With virtuosic concision, McDermott assembles this swirl of seemingly mundane anecdotes into a powerful examination of love, mortality, and ‘the way of all flesh.’”

  — New Yorker

• “[McDermott’s] sentences know themselves so beautifully: what each has to deliver and how best to do it, within a modicum of space, with minimal fuss…McDermott’s excellence is on ample display here.”

  — New York Times Book Review

• “Spectacular…Without ever putting on literary airs, [McDermott] reveals to us what’s distinct about characters who don’t have the ego or eloquence to make a case for themselves as being anything special…[She is] a master of silence and gesture.”

  — NPR

• “One of the great strengths of [Someone] lies in this sense of tenderness and intimacy, of empathy for the human condition…The narrative unfolds slowly, through small moments of beauty and vividness…[A] masterpiece.”

  — Washington Post

• “The maudlin and the twee that have tripped up so many others’ attempts at Irish-American portraiture are no temptation for McDermott. She does not genuflect, nor does she cling to grievance. She looks with a sharp gaze and a generous spirit, finds multitudes even in a clan’s closed air, and tells a clear-eyed, kinder tale.”

  — Boston Globe

• “Someone is ordinary Marie’s scattered retellings of her ordinary life…Her nonlinear presentation, combined with her strangely faulty eyesight, keeps us fascinated.”

  — Dallas Morning News

• “Just as McDermott manages to write lyrically in plain language, she is able to find the drama in uninflected experience. This is the grand accomplishment of Someone, a deceptively simple book that is, in fact, extraordinarily artful, a novel that traces the arc of an unexceptional, almost anonymous life and, seemingly by accident though of course on purpose, turns a run-of-the-mill story into a poem.”

  — Los Angeles Times

• “A quiet tour de force of a story. McDermott writes in lyrical yet methodical prose about an ordinary woman living an ordinary life, a seemingly nonstory with heartache, joy, suffering, and beauty all simmering beneath the scattered recollections that make up the novel…Ordinary life is made extraordinary by McDermott’s tender characterization of women, of husbands, of sons, of parents—a life that includes both the dark and the light within the simply ordinary.”

  — Kansas City Star

• “Few contemporary writers can bring a time and place to life as well as Alice McDermott…[Someone] works the subtle magic of all good art—its particulars yield a universal world…McDermott treats every character with unsentimental fondness. She never sets herself up to forgive or excuse; instead, she embraces each person with a kind of wonder and acceptance that becomes its own form of morality. A rare and lovely writer, she’s given us another book brimming with earthly grace.”

  — Cleveland Plain Dealer

• “[A] deceptively simple tour de force…[McDermott] is such an exceptional writer: in her hands, an uncomplicated life becomes singularly fascinating, revealing the heart of a woman whose defeats make us ache and whose triumphs we cheer. Marie’s vision (and ours) eventually clears, and she comes to understand that what she so often failed to see lay right in front of her eyes.”

  — Publishers Weekly (starred review)

• “Readers who love refined, unhurried, emotionally fluent fiction will rejoice at National Book Award–winner McDermott’s return. McDermott…is a master of hidden intensities, intricate textures, spiked dialogue, and sparkling wit.”

  — Booklist (starred review)

• “One of the author’s most trenchant explorations into the heart and soul of the twentieth-century Irish-American family.”

  — Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

• “McDermott’s nuanced writing turns the mundane into poetry. Kate Reading’s narration fits perfectly as she weaves her way through this story of an ordinary person living an ordinary life…Reading keeps a steady pace as Marie knits the past and the present into a life of loneliness, love, and loss.”

  — AudioFile

• “An excellent performance. Kate Reading makes the range of emotions entirely believable.

  — Publisher's Weekly

• McDermott's nuanced writing turns the mundane into poetry. Kate Reading's narration fits perfectly.

  — AudioFile

• Kate Reading narrates the story in a smooth, easy voice and takes great care to match McDermott's pacing and to highlight her lyrical writing. She has created a fitting ode to McDermott's luminous novel.

  — Booklist

• In this deceptively simple tour de force, McDermott . . . lays bare the keenly observed life of Marie Commeford, an ordinary woman whose compromised eyesight makes her both figuratively and literally unable to see the world for what it is . . . We come to feel for this unremarkable woman, whose vulnerability makes her all the more winning--and makes her worthy of our attention. And that's why McDermott, a three-time Pulitzer nominee, is such an exceptional writer: in her hands, an uncomplicated life becomes singularly fascinating, revealing the heart of a woman whose defeats make us ache and whose triumphs we cheer. Marie's vision (and ours) eventually clears, and she comes to understand that what she so often failed to see lay right in front of her eyes.

  — Publishers Weekly (starred)

• One of the author's most trenchant explorations into the heart and soul of the 20th-century Irish-American family . . . Marie's straightforward narration is interrupted with occasional jumps back and forward in time that create both a sense of foreboding and continuity as well as a mediation on the nature of sorrow . . . Marie and Gabe are compelling in their basic goodness, as is McDermott's elegy to a vanished world.

  — Kirkus