Let The Great World Spin - Colum McCann

One August morning in 1974, a tightrope walker makes his way, through the dawn light, between the World Trade Center towers. In the streets below, a slew of ordinary lives become extraordinary in this stunningly intricate portrait of a city and its people. Corrigan, a radical, young Irish monk, struggles with his demons in the burning Bronx. A group of mothers gathers in a Park Avenue apartment to mourn their sons who have died in Vietnam. Farther uptown, Tillie, a thirty-eight-year-old grandmother, turns tricks alongside her teenaged daughter, determined to take care of her babies and to prove her own worth.

Hailed as an American masterpiece, McCann’s powerful allegory of 9/11 comes alive in the unforgettable voices of these, and other, seemingly disparate characters, drawn together by hope, beauty and the tightrope walker’s “artistic crime of the century.” McCann’s most ambitious work to date, Let the Great World Spin is a triumphant novel.

'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

Bibliographic information

Title          Let The Great World Spin
Author       Colum McCann
Publisher   Penguin , 2009, Trade Paperback
ISBN          1408800497, 9781408800492
Length        349 pages

Subject       Fiction › General
Fiction / Cultural Heritage

Fiction / Psychological

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