Adult Book of the Month
Let
the Great World Spin by Colum McCann
Published by Bloomsbury in 2009
Colm McCann’s novel centres round the August 1974 tightrope walk of French acrobat, Philippe Petit, between the twin towers of the newly opened World Trade Center. The novel features a series of stories about a cast of very different characters for whom this day has special significance. McCann brings these disparate stories together to create a wonderful novel about grief and hope and about how human beings continue to move on even in the most difficult times.
The story begins in Sandymount in Dublin with two of the novel’s central characters - a budding monk named Corrigan and his college drop-out brother, Ciaran. Ciaran follows his brother to the housing projects of the South Bronx where Corrigan informally ministers to the prostitutes who peddle their wares beneath the Major Deegan Expressway. Gradually we are introduced to the other characters in the book: the heroin-addicted hookers whom Corrigan befriends; mothers Claire and Gloria who meet to mourn their sons lost in war and Claire’s husband, Solomon, a Park Avenue judge; a Guatemalan nurse with whom Corrigan falls in love and a young artist with a drug problem. The lives of these disparate characters overlap as the story progresses and merge in the final chapters of the book in an uplifting conclusion to this intricate portrait of a city and its people.
‘Let the Great World Spin is an emotional tour de force. It is a heartbreaking book, but not a depressing one.’ Jonathan Mahler New York Times
‘Let the Great World Spin is the author’s most ambitious novel yet: a dazzlingly rich vision of the pain, loveliness, mystery, and promise of New York City in the 1970s.’ The National Book Award
Colum McCann was born in Dublin. His fiction has been published in thirty languages. He lives in New York City. Let the Great World Spin won the 2009 National Book Award for Fiction.
By the same author:
Dancer
Everything in this Country Must
Fishing the Sloe-Black River
Songdogs
This Side of Brightness
Zoli
