$32.99 (Trade paperback / Bloomsbury / ISBN:9781408800492)
Let The Great World Spin
Winner of the 2009 National Book Award for Fiction.
In the dawning light of a late-summer morning, the people of lower Manhattan stand hushed, staring up in disbelief at the Twin Towers. It is August 1974, and a mysterious tightrope walker is running, dancing, leaping between the towers, suspended a quarter mile above the ground. In the streets below, a slew of ordinary lives become extraordinary in bestselling novelist Colum McCann's stunningly intricate portrait of a city and its people.
Let the Great World Spin is the critically acclaimed author's most ambitious novel yet: a dazzlingly rich vision of the pain, loveliness, mystery, and promise of New York City in the 1970s.
Corrigan, 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. Tillie, a thirty-eight-year-old grandmother, turns tricks alongside her teenage daughter, determined not only to take care of her family but to prove her own worth.
Elegantly weaving together these and other seemingly disparate lives, McCann's powerful allegory comes alive in the unforgettable voices of the city's people, unexpectedly drawn together by hope, beauty, and the artistic crime of the century. A sweeping and radical social novel, Let the Great World Spin captures the spirit of America in a time of transition, extraordinary promise, and, in hindsight, heartbreaking innocence. Hailed as "a fiercely original talent" (San Francisco Chronicle), award-winning novelist McCann has delivered a triumphantly American masterpiece that awakens in us a sense of what the novel can achieve, confront, and even heal.
National Book Awards 2009 Winners
Let The Great World Spin
$32.99 (Trade paperback / Bloomsbury )
Winner of the 2009 National Book Award for Fiction.
In the dawning light of a late-summer morning, the people of lower Manhattan stand hushed, staring up in disbelief at the Twin Towers. It is August 1974, and a mysterio... More »
Review
The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt
$60.95 (Hardcover book / Alfred A Knopf )
A gripping, groundbreaking biography of the combative man whose genius and force of will created modern capitalism.
Founder of a dynasty, builder of the original Grand Central, creator of an impossibly vast fortune, Corn... More »
Transcendental Studies: A Trilogy
$33.95 (Paperback book / Univ California Pr )
This compelling selection of recent work by internationally celebrated poet Keith Waldrop presents three related poem sequences--"Shipwreck in Haven," "Falling in Love through a Description," and "The Plummet of Vitruviu... More »
Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice
$33.95 (Hardcover book / Farrar Straus & Giro )
“When it comes to justice, there is no easy way to get it. You can’t sugarcoat it. You have to take a stand and say, ‘This is not right.’” – Claudette Colvin
On March 2, 1955, an impassioned teenager, fed up ... More »
National Book Awards 2009 (Fiction Finalists)
Lark and Termite
$47.95 (Hardcover book / Alfred A Knopf )
A rich, wonderfully alive novel from one of our most admired and best-loved writers, her first book in nine years. Lark and Termite is set during the 1950s in West Virginia and Korea. It is a story of the power of loss a... More »
Let The Great World Spin
$32.99 (Trade paperback / Bloomsbury )
Winner of the 2009 National Book Award for Fiction.
In the dawning light of a late-summer morning, the people of lower Manhattan stand hushed, staring up in disbelief at the Twin Towers. It is August 1974, and a mysterio... More »
Review
American Salvage
$30.95 (Paperback book / Wayne State Univ Pr )
New from award-winning Michigan writer Bonnie Jo Campbell, American Salvage is rich with local color and peopled with rural characters who love and hate extravagantly. They know how to fix cars and washing machines, how ... More »
In Other Rooms, Other Wonders
$35.00 (Hardcover book / Allen & Unwin )
The linked stories in In Other Rooms, Other Wonders illuminate a place and a people as they describe the overlapping worlds of an extended Pakistani landowning family: the servants and dependents in Mr K.K. Harouni's ove... More »