TransAtlantic
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3.5 • 2 Ratings
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- £7.99
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- £7.99
Publisher Description
SHORTLISTED FOR THE INTERNATIONAL IMPAC DUBLIN LITERARY AWARD 2015
LONGLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2013
SHORTLISTED FOR THE IRISH NOVEL OF THE YEAR 2013
'It is, simply, perfect' Irish Examiner
'Majestic' Sunday Times
'Quite simply one of the best, most sustained pieces of fiction I've read in some time' Independent
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In 1919 Emily Ehrlich watches as two young airmen, Alcock and Brown, emerge from the carnage of World War One to pilot the very first non-stop transatlantic flight from Newfoundland to the west of Ireland.
In 1845 Frederick Douglass, a black American slave, lands in Ireland to champion ideas of democracy and freedom, only to find a famine unfurling at his feet.
And in 1998 Senator George Mitchell criss-crosses the ocean in search of an elusive Irish peace.
Stitching these stories intricately together, Colum McCann sets out to explore the fine line between what is real and what is imagined, and the tangled skein of connections that make up our lives.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In 1919, two British veterans pilot a Vickers Vimy from Newfoundland to Ireland, becoming the first men to fly across the Atlantic, taking "the war out of the plane." In 1845, escaped American slave Frederick Douglass comes to Ireland at the start of the famine on a speaking tour, staying with Irish Quakers and inspiring their maid to seek her future in America. In 1998, decades into the Troubles, American Senator George Mitchell brokers the Good Friday Peace Accords. Darting in, past, and through these stories are generations of women, including the maid's descendants, Irish, American, Canadian, with sons lost to the civil wars of both continents. This is what interests McCann: lives made amid and despite violence; the hidden braids of places, times, and people; the way the old days "arrive back in the oddest ways, suddenly taut, breaking the surface." A beautiful writer, if overly partial to three-word phrases ("Kites of language. Clouds of logic") that can start to call attention to themselves, McCann won the National Book Award for Let the Great World Spin, which also linked disparate stories. This time though, while each story is interesting, the threads between them especially in the last section, which features the maid's great-granddaughter aren't pulled taut enough by shared meaning.
