![]() ![]() Among these events we see the changed world through the experiences of four generations of women – Lily Duggan, Emily Ehrlich, Lottie Tuttle, Hannah Carson – though it is not always clear why the incidents we are witnessing are important to them. From this point we pivot backwards to a famine-ravaged Ireland, the Abolitionist movement and the American Civil War, and forward to the financial crash of 1929, the Good Friday Agreement, and the taming of the Celtic Tiger. TransAtlantic opens in 1919 with a reconstruction of Brown and Alcock's attempt to fly the Atlantic non-stop. Through an ambitious structure, McCann shows how the thrum of history binds the two countries tighter than any politically forced "special relationship", and the transformative power of the past over the present. I spoke with McCann at last week’s Book Expo America in New York. ![]() He is a Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing in the Master of Fine Arts program at Hunter College, New York and a regular visitor to the European Graduate School. As its title suggests, TransAtlantic – Colum McCann's first novel following the breakout success of Let the Great World Spin, and now long-listed for the Man Booker Prize – is a novel of both destinations and arrivals, of home and away: its subject, the complex relationship between the US and Ireland. McCann is an Irish writer who writes more authentically about America than most American writers. Colum McCann is an Irish writer of literary fictiontwo collections of short stories and several novels, most recently TransAtlantic (2013). ![]()
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