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Let the Great World Spin
by Colum McCann

RRP €16.00

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Let the Great World Spin
Colum McCann

Book details for title
List Price: €16.00
Format: Paperback, 234 x 153mm, 368pp
Publication date: 07 Sep 2009
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
ISBN-13: 9781408800492

Dubray Review

Let The Great World Spin is a novel of great and delicate balance that explores how love and chance can affect people’s lives. As seen in the Oscar-winning movie Man on Wire, Philippe Petit performed a high-wire act between the two towers of the World Trade Centre in 1974. New York was going through one of the worst patches in its history – a city ravaged by drugs and crime and heading towards bankruptcy – and so provides a captivating backdrop for the book. Each of the many characters assembled here, from the down-to-earth to the highly-strung, gives us their take on how this one memorable day passed for them. These disparate stories are integrated into a cohesive whole and McCann’s real achievement is to show how each and every one of us is somehow connected within the swirling mass of humanity.

- Kevin Power, Kilkenny

Synopsis

New York, August 1974. A man is walking the sky. The city stands still in awe. Between the newly built Twin Towers the man is striding, twirling and showboating his way through the air. One hundred and ten stories below him, the lives of eight strangers spin towards each other Corrigan, a radical, passionate Irish monk working in the Bronx with a clutch of prostitutes; Claire, a delicate Upper East Side housewife reeling from the death of her son in Vietnam; her husband Solomon, a cynical judge turning over petty criminals in a downtown court; Lara, a young artist struggling with a spiralling drug addiction and a doomed marriage; Fernando, a thirteen-year-old photographer chasing underground graffiti; Gloria, solid and proud despite decades of hardship; Tillie, a courageous hooker who used to dream of a better life; and Jazzlyn, her beautiful, reckless daughter raised on promises that reach beyond the high rises of New York. Set against a time of sweeping political and social change, from the backlash to the Vietnam War and the lingering sceptre of the oil crisis to the beginnings of the Internet - a time that hauntingly mirrors the present time - these disparate lives will collide in the shadow of one reckless and beautiful act, and be transformed for ever. Weaving together themes of love, loss, belonging, duty and human striving, Let the Great World Spin celebrates the effervescent spirit of an age and the small beauties of everyday life. At once intimate and magnificent, elegant and astonishing, it is a lyrical masterpiece from a storyteller who continues to use the wide world as his canvas.

Reviews

'With Phillipe Petit's breathless 1974 tightrope walk between the uncompleted World Trade Centre towers at its axis, Colum McCann offers us a lyrical cycloramic high-low portrait of New York City in its days of burning; Park Avenue matrons, Bronx junkies, Center Street judges, downtown artists and their uptown subway-tagging brethren, street priests, weary cops, wearier hookers, grieving mothers of an Asian war freshly put to bed; a masterful chorus of voices all obliviously connected by the most ephemeral vision; a pin-dot of a man walking on air 110 storeys above their heads' Richard Price A blockbuster, groundbreaking, heartbreaking, symphony of a novel No novelist writing of New York has climbed higher, dived deeper' Frank McCourt 'A giant amongst us - fearless, huge-hearted, a poet with every living breathe' Peter Carey 'An audacious and wonderfully skilled writer' Joseph O'Connor