num_pages: 351
description: 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 McCanns stunningly intricate portrait of a city and its people.Let the Great World Spin is the critically acclaimed authors 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 McCanns powerful allegory comes alive in the unforgettable voices of the citys 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.
language: English
title: Let the Great World Spin
publisher: Random House