Let the Great World Spin

An American masterpiece from internationally bestselling novelist Colum McCann - a dazzling and hauntingly rich vision of the loveliness, pain, and mystery of New York City in the 1970s

In the dawning light of the late summer morning, the people of lower Manhattan stand hushed, staring up in disbelief at the Twin Towers. . . . It is August, 1974, and a tightrope walker is running, dancing, leaping between the towers, suspended a quarter-mile in the sky. In the streets below, ordinary lives become extraordinary as award-winning novelist Colum McCann crafts this stunningly realized portrait of a city and its people.

Corrigan, a radical young Irish monk, struggles with his own demons as he lives among prostitutes in the Bronx. A group of mothers, gathered in a Park Avenue apartment to mourn the sons who died in Vietnam, discovers how much divides them even in their grief. Further uptown, Tillie, a thirty-eight-year-old grandmother, turns tricks alongside her teenaged daughter, determined not only to take care of her 'babies' but to prove her own worth.

Elegantly weaving together these and other seemingly disparate lives, McCann's powerful novel comes alive in the unforgettable voices of the city's people, unexpectedly 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 an unmistakable and triumphantly American masterpiece.


Genre: Literary Fiction

"Fearless, huge-hearted, a poet with every living breath." - Peter Carey