The Sixteenth opens on the day sixteen-year-old Kathleen witnesses the near-simultaneous deaths of President John F. Kennedy and her own mother. In the aftermath, her father—Baltimore’s district attorney—collapses under grief, abandoning the family home and leaving Kathleen to care for her two younger sisters.
The novel closes in the months before the coronavirus pandemic shuts down the world. Between those two moments, more than fifty years unfold, each traced through the lives of the family’s daughters at the age of sixteen. Their coming-of-age stories intersect with the shifting currents of American history: the rise of feminism, changing racial dynamics, the Vietnam era and its aftermath, the AIDS crisis and LGBTQ+ visibility, wars abroad, and disasters at home. Against this backdrop, Baltimore itself becomes a living presence—at once resilient and unraveling, a city defined not by monuments but by its people.
Spanning generations, The Sixteenth is an inventive family saga about inheritance, silence, and the secrets we choose to pass on by what we say—and what we refuse to tell.
Praise for The Sixteenth
“The Sixteenth unfolds like the petals of a brilliant blossom, with history acting upon the lives of the four generations of Morrissey women like so much sun and rain. Bauer draws us into the lived experience of each woman as she approaches adulthood, while all the while painting the portrait of a family dynamic set into motion by the heartbreaking decision of one man. Read this glorious and piercing novel and you’ll never think about what binds people, in a family or a nation, the same way again.”
—Rachel Basch, author of The Passion of Reverend Nash and The Listener
“A literary treat! Leapfrogging through history with great narrative invention, this book stayed with me long after I finished reading it. Couching her story in gorgeous, precise prose, Bauer finds poetry in the simplest corners of her characters’ lives. Ultimately, The Sixteenth makes a compelling case for how our past informs our future and, most remarkably, our future informs our past.”
—Joe DiPietro, playwright, Tony-winner for Memphis
“The Sixteenth brings to mind the dramas of sisters, as in Austen and Alcott: the absent father, daughters who must rely on themselves and each other. The epic of family life begins and ends in the same city, Baltimore. In the same house. Generation by generation, as the Morrissey girls become women each finds her voice and the path that projects her into her life. There are the glancing blows of men, but no bond as strong as that of the sisters to one another. But the book is also a history of an era from Tupperware parties and Beanie Babies to Civil Rights, the draft, AIDS. I loved reading this book.”
—Elaine Terranova, Walt Whitman Award-winning poet for The Cult of the Right Hand
