Let the Great World Spin

From Strand Bookstore

In the dawning light of the late summer morning, the citizens 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. WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR FICTION. 349p.

From the Publisher

In a tale set in Manhattan of 1974, a radical young Irish monk struggles with personal demons while making his home among Bronx prostitutes, a group of mothers is separated by personal differences in spite of shared grief over their lost Vietnam soldier sons, and a young grandmother attempts to prove her worth by soliciting men at the side of her teenage daughter.

Review

Justin Beplate - Times Literary Supplement
"[A] bravura performance by McCann....In the smaller scraps of history,...we discern the broader patterns of events to come."

Review

Jonathan Mahler - New York Times Book Review
"LET THE GREAT WORLD SPIN is an emotional tour de force. It is a heartbreaking book, but not a depressing one....It is a mark of the novel's soaring and mostly fulfilled ambition that McCann just keeps rolling out new people, deftly linking each to the next, as his story moves toward its surprising and deeply affecting conclusion."

Review

Bob Minzesheimer - USA Today
"McCann....goes out....on his own literary tightrope. He weaves an ambitious mosaic....[of] lives [that] intersect in surprising yet believable ways.....[LET THE GREAT WORLD SPIN] 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."

Review

Mike Peed - Washington Post
"[Philippe] Petit's stunt acts as a centerline on which McCann hangs the stories of a dozen spiritually disheveled characters, each searching for an alcove of silence in a clamorous city."

More about the book

In this dazzlingly unique novel, which won the 2009 National Book Award for fiction, Colum McCann examines the trajectories of the lives of several people whose lives twist and converge around one man's transgressive act of courage--a tightrope walk between the twin towers of the World Trade Center. While this figure is known only as "the tightrope walker," he is obviously based on Philippe Petit, who performed the outrageous stunt in 1974, an event commemorated in the popular 2008 documentary, MAN ON WIRE. In McCann's novel, this extraordinary feat initiates a chain of events which will forever alter the lives of an eclectic mix of characters, including an Irish monk, a mother and daughter pair of prostitutes, an artist guilty of a hit-and-run, and a support group of mothers who lost their sons in Vietnam. Like a rock lobbed into calm waters, a single momentous act causes ripples whose individual effects are more profound and more enduring than that of the initial splash. Selected by the New York Times Book Review as a Notable Book of 2009.

Synopses

A rich vision of the pain, loveliness, mystery, and promise of New York City in the 1970s. 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. A 38-year-old grandmother, turns tricks alongside her teenage daughter, determined not only to take care of her family but to prove her own worth. Weaving together these and other seemingly disparate lives, McCann's allegory comes alive in the voices of the city's people, unexpectedly drawn together by hope, beauty, and the "artistic crime of the century"--a mysterious tightrope walker dancing between the Twin Towers.--From publisher description.