Colum McCann is the internationally bestselling author of the novels Let the Great World Spin, Zoli, Dancer, This Side of Brightness, and Songdogs, as well as two critically acclaimed story collections. His fiction has been published in thirty-five languages. He has received many honors, including the National Book Award, the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, a Chevalier des Arts et Lettres from the French government, and the Ireland Fund of Monaco Literary Award in Memory of Princess Grace. He has been named one of Esquire’s “Best & Brightest,” and his short film Everything in This Country Must was nominated for an Oscar in 2005. A contributor to The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic Monthly, and The Paris Review, he teaches in the Hunter College MFA Creative Writing Program. He lives in New York City with his wife and their three children.
“A dazzlingly talented author’s latest high-wire act . . .
Reminiscent of the finest work of Michael Ondaatje and Michael
Cunningham, TransAtlantic is Colum McCann’s most penetrating novel
yet.”—O: The Oprah Magazine
“What distinguishes TransAtlantic from [Colum] McCann’s earlier
work isn’t the stunning language or the psychological acuity or the
humor and imagination on display—all of that has been there before.
It’s the sheer ambition, the audacity to imagine within the same
novel the experience of Frederick Douglass in 1845 . . . then the
first nonstop trans-Atlantic flight in 1919 . . . then to leap into
the near-present and embody the former senator George Mitchell, . .
. knitting through and around them the stories of four generations
of women.”—The New York Times Magazine
“One of the greatest pleasures of TransAtlantic is how provisional
it makes history feel, how intimate, and intensely real. . . . Here
is the uncanny thing McCann finds again and again about the
miraculous: that it is inseparable from the everyday.”—The Boston
Globe
“Ingenious . . . The intricate connections [McCann] has crafted
between the stories of his women and our men [seem] written in air,
in water, and—given that his subject is the confluence of Irish and
American history—in blood.”—Esquire
“Another sweeping, beautifully constructed tapestry of life . . .
Reading McCann is a rare joy.”—The Seattle Times
“Entrancing . . . McCann folds his epic meticulously into this
relatively slim volume like an accordion; each pleat holds
music—elation and sorrow.”—The Denver Post
In 1846, Lily Duggan, a Dublin servant girl, embarks for New York City on a quest for personal freedom. Her journey initiates a family saga connecting the lives of four women with Frederick Douglass's Irish journey in 1845, British aviators Alcock and Brown's 1919 flight from Newfoundland to Ireland, and U.S. Senator George Mitchell's work on the 1998 Belfast Agreement. The lives of Lily and her descendants resonate with shared experiences and an elusive yearning for fulfillment that often expresses itself as a plea for justice. At other times, this desire occupies a vacant existence caused by loss. The story closes with Hannah Carson, Lily's great-granddaughter, nearly forced from the family cottage on Strangford Lough in Northern Ireland, surprised by the tenderness of strangers wishing to create with her something new from her longing for the past. VERDICT McCann's sixth novel (after Let the Great World Spin) is majestic and assures his status as one of the great prose stylists of contemporary fiction as he effortlessly weaves history and fiction into a tapestry depicting all of life's wonders, both ephemeral and foursquare.-John G. Matthews, Washington State Univ. Libs., Pullman (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
|
Ask a Question About this Product More... |
|
