TransAtlantic by Colum McCann
Colum McCann had slowly been accruing critical respect when his 2009 novel, Let The Great World Spin, seemed to push him into the stratosphere. It was one of those novels that had literary lovers alight with passion, and it won him the National Book Award and the 2011 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. Needless to say, expectation for his next novel, TransAtlantic, was high. TransAtlantic tells a sequence of interconnected stories that traverse one hundred and sixty odd years and two continents. It imagines a number of real lives – Alcock and Brown, the first men to fly the Atlantic; Frederick Douglass, the slave who fought for freedom for all slaves; Senator George Mitchell who helped draft the Good Friday peace accords for Northern Ireland – and a number of fictional lives whose stories intersect with historical moments, creating a patchwork effect, revealing the connections that can be made across continents, and through time. McCann’s ...