Charming Billy
Categories: Literature & Fiction
Charming Billy is a 1998 novel by Alice McDermott that won the National Book Award for Fiction. It is set among Irish American families in New York City and Long Island. After the funeral of Billy Lynch, a charming man who drank himself to death, his family and friends gather in a Bronx bar to remember him. The story slowly reveals the lie at the heart of his life: the Irish girl he loved as a young man, whom his cousin Dennis told him had died of pneumonia.
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- Stephen King: “On Writing (Scribner, 2000), "And Furthermore, Part II: A Booklist"”