About this ebook
In Let the Great World Spin, the winner of the National Book Award, Colum McCann thrilled readers with a high-wire act of fiction that The New York Times Book Review called “an emotional tour de force.” Now McCann demonstrates once again why he is one of the most acclaimed and essential authors of his generation with a soaring novel that spans continents, leaps centuries and unites a cast of deftly rendered characters, both real and imagined.
In 1845, a black American slave lands in Ireland to champion ideas of democracy and freedom, only to find a famine ravaging the countryside and the poor suffering from hardships that astonish even him. In 1919, two brave young airmen emerge from the carnage of the First World War to pilot the first non-stop transatlantic flight, from Newfoundland to the west of Ireland. And in 1998, an American senator crosses the ocean to shepherd Northern Ireland’s notoriously volatile peace talks to an uncertain conclusion.
Taking these stories as his point of departure, Colum McCann weaves the lives of Frederick Douglass, John Alcock and Teddy Brown, and Senator George Mitchell into a tapestry that is provocative, ambitious and unforgettable. Intertwined with them are the lives of a series of remarkable women whose personal stories are caught up in the swells of history. Can we pass from the new world to the old? How does the past shape the future? The bestselling TransAtlantic is a profound meditation on time, space and memory and the most mature work yet from an incomparable storyteller.
About the author
COLUM McCANN is the author of five novels and two collections of stories. He has won numerous awards, including the Pushcart Prize, the Rooney Prize, the Hennessy Award for Irish Literature and the Hughes & Hughes Irish Novel of the Year award. His short film Everything in This Country Must was nominated for an Oscar. His fiction has been published in over thirty languages and has appeared in the New Yorker, the Atlantic Monthly, GQ, the Paris Review and Bomb, among other publications. His novel Let the Great World Spin won the National Book Award for Fiction and the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. McCann lives in New York with his wife, Allison, and their three children. He teaches in the MFA program at Hunter College. Visit his website at www.colummccann.com.