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Transatlantic
Colum McCann
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Description for Transatlantic
Hardback. fine in a fine dustjacket, signed by the author
1919. Emily Ehrlich watches as two young airmen, Alcock and Brown, emerge from the carnage of the First World War to pilot the very first non-stop transatlantic flight from Newfoundland to the west of Ireland. Among the letters being carried on the aircraft is one which will not be opened for almost a hundred years. 1998. Senator George Mitchell criss-crosses the ocean in search of an elusive Irish peace. How many more bereaved mothers and grandmothers must he meet before an agreement can be reached? 1845. Frederick Douglass, a black American slave, lands in Ireland to champion ideas of democracy ... Read moreand freedom, only to find a famine unfurling at his feet. On his travels he inspires a young maid to go to New York to embrace a free world, but the land does not always fulfill its promises for her. From the violent battlefields of the Civil War to the ice lakes of northern Missouri, it is her youngest daughter Emily who eventually finds her way back to Ireland.
Can we pass from the new world to the old? How does the past shape the future? In TransAtlantic, National Book Award-winning Colum McCann has achieved an outstanding act of literary bravura. Intricately crafted, poetic and deeply affecting it weaves together personal stories to explore the fine line between what is real and what is imagined, and the tangled skein of connections that make up our lives.
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Product Details
Condition
Used, Very Good
Publisher
Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Place of Publication
London, United Kingdom
Shipping Time
Usually ships in 2 to 4 working days
About Colum McCann
Colum McCann, originally from Dublin, Ireland, is the author of six novels and two collections of stories. His most recent novel, the New York Times bestseller Let the Great World Spin, won the National Book Award, the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and several other major international awards. His fiction has been published in thirty-five languages. He lives in New ... Read moreYork. www.colummccann.com Show Less
Reviews for Transatlantic
Beautifully constructed ... a novel of true resonance and power
Independent
This novel is beautifully hypnotic in its movements, from the grand (between two continents, across three centuries) to the most subtle. Silkily threading together public events and private feelings, TransAtlantic says no to death with every line. Those who can't see the point of historical novels ... Read morewill find their answer here: in all intelligent fiction, the past has not passed
Emma Donoghue
Expertly constructed ... At its best, as in the superbly rendered early scene of Alcock and Brown’s flight, the prose is poetically vivid
Mark O’Connell
Observer
Few contemporary writers are better at subtracting the sublime from the base ... A kind of cat’s cradle of transatlantic journeys, all connected, all built on another thing
Hermione Hoby
Guardian
A challenging, beautifully woven novel about the real and imagined. Fans of Ian McEwan will love it
Viv Groskop
Red
McCann is no stranger to literary prizes — but if I were him, I’d start clearing my mantelpiece for a few more
James Walton
Daily Mail
McCann makes us wonder at how his characters get from A to B; he encourages us to see how journeys elicit distinctions and closeness between people … He is especially striking when he describes the weather: the wind muscles through the grass; clouds perform a curtsy. He has a telegraphic style of transmitting historical content
Freya Johnston
Daily Telegraph
Colum McCann is a very gifted, charming writer; in full, rhapsodic-onrush mode, he is hard to resist. He coins a good phrase...TransAtlantic is deft, well crafted, and broad in its imaginative range. The many people who loved his last novel will certainly enjoy this one
Guardian
A marvellously engrossing journey, studded with ideas and lyrical treats
The Times
It is a record not of great men and great moments but of small, elegant details and personal loss
New Statesman
McCann's prose aspires towards the atmospheric and descriptive...Stylistically, McCann shares a great deal with Michael Ondaatje, while the presence of Don DeLillo, both in form and content, is also apparent ... McCann is drawn to lives lived, and his vivid, reactive and heartfelt fiction lives and breathes, sighs and weeps. Above all, his characters remember the past and contemplate the future
Irish Times
Blending fact and fiction with a poet’s precision ... There’s no doubting the novel’s lyrical and emotional power though
Sunday Express
McCann’s ability to move through such vastly differing places and personalities is as uncanny as it is relentless. Most of the novel is held remarkably together by only the most delicate of strands, through the gentle echoes resonating between the book’s diverse wandering characters ... What drives the novel – like all of McCann’s fiction – is simply the author’s sturdy, humane, unfailing knack for animating period and place in the inner minutiae of individual lives
Sunday Times
Beautifully poignant
Mail on Sunday
Majestic
Sunday Times
A vivid novel of three personal stories intricately woven together around the first transatlantic flight
Mail on Sunday
History comes vividly to life in a majestic work whose characters traverse the Atlantic
Sunday Times Summer Reads
It is, simply, perfect. McCann’s writing is sublime; his images shine
Irish Examiner
A shamelessly daring, ambitious epic of a novel ... McCann’s impulse is towards a Joycean magnanimity, affirmativeness and bravery ...
Lady
McCann is at the height of his lyrical powers ... Though it may sound forbiddingly schematic, TransAtlantic’s narrative strands are deftly linked through the fictional Ehrlich family. Far from being a celebration of historical acts of derring-do, McCann’s ambitious, touching and occasionally joyous novel is a paean to self-determination in all its forms
Daragh Reddin
Metro
The forces at work in our lives, Colum McCann makes arrestingly clear, begin long before we’re born. Several wider thematic links also emerge – and so slyly that days after finishing the book, you’re still making them
Sheena Davit and Mary Carr
Irish Mail on Sunday
A very refined piece of writing
Philip Hensher
Spectator
The book I’ve enjoyed most this year
Andrew Marr
Mail on Sunday
History comes vividly alive in a majestic work
Sunday Times, Summer Reading
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