Letter to a Young Writer (And You Too)

'Remarkable ... nimble, lyrical and wispy' Sunday Times<BR>'An utterly riveting, frequently moving, and staggeringly well-written book' Daily Mail<BR>'Breathtaking' Guardian<BR>________________________<BR>This novel opens on a battlefield: trudging back from the front through a ravaged and icy wasteland, their horses dying around them, their own hunger rendering them almost savage, the Russian soldiers are exhausted as they reach the city of Ufa, desperate for food and shelter.<BR><BR>They find both, and then music and dance. And there, spinning unafraid among them, dancing for the soldiers and anyone else who'll watch him, is one small pale boy, Rudolf. This is Colum McCann's dancer: Rudolf, a prodigy at six years old, who became the greatest dancer of the century, who redefined dance, rewrote his own life, and died of AIDS before anyone knew he had it. <BR><BR>This is an extraordinary life transformed into extraordinary fiction by one of the most acclaimed writers of his generation. One kind of masculine grace is perfectly matched to another in Colum McCann's beautiful and daring new novel.

WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD'A wow of a novel - rich, humane, brilliantly written anda as deep as it is wide' The Times'An astonishing balancing act by a great writer prepared to take risks. A book to treasure' Daily Mail________________________New York, August 1974: a man is walking in the sky.Between the newly built Twin Towers, the man twirls through the air. Far below, the lives of complete strangers spin towards each other: Corrigan, a radical Irish monk working in the Bronx; Claire, a delicate Upper East Side housewife reeling from the death of her son; Lara, a drug-addled young artist; Gloria, solid and proud despite decades of hardship; Tillie, a hooker who used to dream of a better life; and Jazzlyn, her beautiful daughter raised on promises that reach beyond the skyline of New York.In the shadow of one reckless and beautiful act, these disparate lives will collide, and be transformed for ever. (lib)

NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER • Colum McCann's beloved novel inspired by Philippe Petit's daring high-wire stunt, which is also depicted in the film The Walk starring Joseph Gordon-LevittIn the dawning light of a late-summer morning, the people of lower Manhattan stand hushed, staring up in disbelief at the Twin Towers. It is August 1974, and a mysterious tightrope walker is running, dancing, leaping between the towers, suspended a quarter mile above the ground. In the streets below, a slew of ordinary lives become extraordinary in bestselling novelist Colum McCann's stunningly intricate portrait of a city and its people. Let the Great World Spin is the critically acclaimed author's most ambitious novel yet: a dazzlingly rich vision of the pain, loveliness, mystery, and promise of New York City in the 1970s. Corrigan, a radical young Irish monk, struggles with his own demons as he lives among the prostitutes in the middle of the burning Bronx. A group of mothers gather in a Park Avenue apartment to mourn their sons who died in Vietnam, only to discover just how much divides them even in grief. A young artist finds herself at the scene of a hit-and-run that sends her own life careening sideways. Tillie, a thirty-eight-year-old grandmother, turns tricks alongside her teenage daughter, determined not only to take care of her family but to prove her own worth. Elegantly weaving together these and other seemingly disparate lives, McCann's powerful allegory comes alive in the unforgettable voices of the city's people, unexpectedly drawn together by hope, beauty, and the "artistic crime of the century."A sweeping and radical social novel, Let the Great World Spin captures the spirit of America in a time of transition, extraordinary promise, and, in hindsight, heartbreaking innocence. Hailed as a "fiercely original talent" (San Francisco Chronicle), award-winning novelist McCann has delivered a triumphantly American masterpiece that awakens in us a sense of what the novel can achieve, confront, and even heal.Praise for Let the Great World Spin"This is a gorgeous book, multilayered and deeply felt, and it's a damned lot of fun to read, too. Leave it to an Irishman to write one of the greatest-ever novels about New York. There's so much passion and humor and pure lifeforce on every page of Let the Great World Spin that you'll find yourself giddy, dizzy, overwhelmed."-Dave Eggers"Stunning . . . [an] elegiac glimpse of hope . . . It's a novel rooted firmly in time and place. It vividly captures New York at its worst and best. But it transcends all that. In the end, it's a novel about families-the ones we're born into and the ones we make for ourselves."-USA Today "The first great 9/11 novel . . . We are all dancing on the wire of history, and even on solid ground we breathe the thinnest of air."-Esquire "Mesmerizing . . . a Joycean look at the lives of New Yorkers changed by a single act on a single day . . . Colum McCann's marvelously rich novel . . . weaves a portrait of a city and a moment, dizzyingly satisfying to read and difficult to put down."-The Seattle Times "Vibrantly whole . . . With a series of spare, gorgeously wrought vignettes, Colum McCann brings 1970s New York to life. . . . And as always, McCann's heart-stoppingly simple descriptions wow."-Entertainment Weekly "An act of pure bravado, dizzying proof that to keep your balance you need to know how to fall."-O: The Oprah Magazine

A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER LONGLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE SHORTLISTED FOR THE DUBLIN LITERARY AWARD SHORTLISTED FOR THE PRIX FEMINA AND THE PRIX MEDICIS SHORTLISTED FOR THE GOLDSBORO BOOKS GLASS BELL AWARD WINNER OF THE PRIX DU MEILLEUR LIVRES ETRANGER WINNER OF THE 2020 NATIONAL JEWISH BOOK AWARDS CHOSEN AS A BOOK OF 2020 BY THE SUNDAY TIMES, OBSERVER, GUARDIAN, i PAPER, FINANCIAL TIMES, NEW STATESMAN, SCOTSMAN, IRISH TIMES, BBC.COM, WATERSTONES.COM 'A wondrous book. It left me hopeful; this is its gift' Elizabeth Strout 'An empathy engine ... It is, itself, an agent of change' New York Times Book Review 'A quite extraordinary novel' Kamila Shamsie How do we continue living once we have lost our reason to live? Rami and Bassam live in the city of Jerusalem - but exist worlds apart, divided by an age-old conflict. And yet they have one thing in common. Both are fathers; both are fathers of daughters - and both daughters are now lost. When Rami and Bassam meet, and tell one another the story of their grief, the most unexpected thing of all happens: they become best of friends. And their stories become one story, a story with the power to heal - and the power to change the world. 'The book goes anywhere and everywhere. It is a delirious and thrilling improvisation, a jazz solo spun out of that meeting . A spectacular structure of stories about everything' Bryan Appleyard, Sunday Times

"McCann ist ein Geschichtenerzähler, wie wir wirklich nur wenige haben." (Elke Heidenreich)Rudolf Nurejew galt als einer der größten Tänzer aller Zeiten. McCann begibt sich in seinem Roman auf die Spuren eines Künstlerlebens, das rätselhaft bleibt. Aus der Sicht der Wegbegleiter des Genies erzählt, entsteht ein schillerndes Kaleidoskop, das von Ost und West, Partyleben und Künstlereinsamkeit, Genialität, Trieb und Tod erzählt. Ein Leben wie ein Roman - ein wilder Tanz."Das Buch ist so schwerelos wie ein Grand jeté seines Helden." (Der Spiegel)

INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER • An “urgent [and] ingenious” (The New York Times Book Review) novel of rupture and repair in the digital age, delving into a hidden world deep under the ocean—from the New York Times bestselling author of Apeirogon and Let the Great World Spin“The spirit of Joseph Conrad hovers over the text, but here the heart of darkness lies at the bottom of the ocean.”—Salman Rushdie“Everything gets fixed, and we all stay broken.”Anthony Fennell, an Irish journalist and playwright, is assigned to cover the underwater cables that carry the world’s information. The sum of human existence—words, images, transactions, memes, voices, viruses—travels through the tiny fiber-optic tubes. But sometimes the tubes break, at an unfathomable depth.Fennell’s journey brings him to the west coast of Africa, where he uncovers a story about the raw human labor behind the dazzling veneer of the technological world. He meets a fellow Irishman, John Conway, the chief of mission on a cable repair ship. The mysterious Conway is a skilled engineer and a freediver capable of reaching extraordinary depths. He is also in love with a South African actress, Zanele, who must leave to go on her own literary adventure to London.When the ship is sent up the coast to repair a series of major underwater breaks, both men learn that the very cables they seek to fix carry the news that may cause their lives to unravel. At sea, they are forced to confront the most elemental questions of life, love, absence, belonging, and the perils of our severed connections. Can we, in our fractured world, reweave ourselves out of the thin, broken threads of our pasts? Can the ruptured things awaken us from our despair?Resoundingly simple and turbulent at the same time, Twist is a meditation on the nature of narrative and truth from one of the great storytellers of our times.