Transatlantic: A Novel
by Colum Mccann

Description

In the National Book Award-winning "Let the Great World Spin, "Colum McCann thrilled readers with a marvelous high-wire act of fiction that "The New York Times Book Review "called"""an emotional tour de force." Now McCann demonstrates once again why he is one of the most acclaimed and essential authors of his generation with a soaring novel that spans continents, leaps centuries, and unites a cast of deftly rendered characters, both real and imagined. Newfoundland, 1919. Two aviators--Jack Alcock and Arthur Brown--set course for Ireland as they attempt the first nonstop flight across the Atlantic Ocean, placing their trust in a modified bomber to heal the wounds of the Great War. Dublin, 1845 and '46. On an international lecture tour in support of his subversive autobiography, Frederick Douglass finds the Irish people sympathetic to the abolitionist cause--despite the fact that, as famine ravages the countryside, the poor suffer from hardships that are astonishing even to an American slave. New York, 1998. Leaving behind a young wife and newborn child, Senator George Mitchell departs for Belfast, where it has fallen to him, the son of an Irish-American father and a Lebanese mother, to shepherd Northern Ireland's notoriously bitter and volatile peace talks to an uncertain conclusion. These three iconic crossings are connected by a series of remarkable women whose personal stories are caught up in the swells of history. Beginning with Irish housemaid Lily Duggan, who crosses paths with Frederick Douglass, the novel follows her daughter and granddaughter, Emily and Lottie, and culminates in the present-day story of Hannah Carson, in whom all the hopes and failures of previous generations live on. From the loughs of Ireland to the flatlands of Missouri and the windswept coast of Newfoundland, their journeys mirror the progress and shape of history. They each learn that even the most unassuming moments of grace have a way of rippling through time, space, and memory. The most mature work yet from an incomparable storyteller, "TransAtlantic" is a profound meditation on identity and history in a wide world that grows somehow smaller and more wondrous with each passing year. Praise for Colum McCann's "Let the Great World Spin, "Winner of the National Book Award "One of the most electric, profound novels I have read in years."--Jonathan Mahler, "The New York Times Book Review" "There's so much passion and humor and pure life force on every page that you'll find yourself giddy, dizzy, overwhelmed."--Dave Eggers "Stunning . . . [an] elegiac glimpse of hope."--"USA Today" " " "Marvelously rich . . . a Joycean look at the lives of New Yorkers changed by a single act on a single day."--"The Seattle Times" "McCann's gift [is] finding grace in grief and magic in the mundane, and immersing the reader in these thoroughly."--"San Francisco Chronicle" "An act of pure bravado."--"O: The Oprah Magazine"