ork Times bestselling author Alice McDermott, "has taken a suburban teenage romance and pregnancy and infused it with the power, the ominousness, and the star-crossed romanticism of a contemporary Romeo and Juliet" (Chicago Tribune)

A Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award

It is high summer, the early 1960s. Sheryl and Rick, two Long Island teenagers, share an intense, all-consuming love. But Sheryl's widowed mother steps between them, and one moonlit night Rick and a gang of hoodlums descend upon her quiet neighborhood.

That night, driven by Rick's determination to reclaim Sheryl, the young men provoke a violent confrontation, and as fathers step forward to protect their turf, notions of innocence belonging to both sides of the brawl are fractured forever.

Alice McDermott's That Night "is as carefully constructed as a poem, giving off a lustrous glow, and is poignant in the telling" (People).