The Ninth Hour

I had read a short story based on this novel in The New Yorker a year or so ago, and Sr. St. Saviour won my heart. Walking home after a long day begging for funds for her order of nursing sisters, feet aching and longing to empty her bursting bladder, the 60-something-year-old nun enters unbidden a smoky building where a young man has just committed suicide by turning on the gas. Sister determines to lead the way forward for his surviving wife, Annie, and young daughter, Sally. Sally becomes the convent pet after her mother takes a job working with Sr. Illuminata in the laundry in the basement of a convent set in the heart of mid-century Brooklyn. It is Sally's story, and that of her mother's friend, little Sr. Jeanne, that takes center stage in this beautiful little novel, a tale of the paradoxes and sacrifices that love of God and of other frail human beings entail.