A propulsive novel of rupture and repair in the digital age, delving into a hidden world deep under the ocean--from the New York Times bestselling author of Apeirogon and Let the Great World Spin

The spirit of Joseph Conrad hovers over the text, but here the heart of darkness lies at the bottom of the ocean.--Salman Rushdie

Everything gets fixed, and we all stay broken.

Anthony Fennell, an Irish journalist and playwright, is assigned to cover the underwater cables that carry the world's information. The sum of human existence--words, images, transactions, memes, voices, viruses--travels through the tiny fiber-optic tubes. But sometimes the tubes break, at an unfathomable depth.

Fennell's journey brings him to the west coast of Africa, where he uncovers a story about the raw human labor behind the dazzling veneer of the technological world. He meets a fellow Irishman, John Conway, the chief of mission on a cable repair ship. The mysterious Conway is a skilled engineer and a freediver capable of reaching extraordinary depths. He is also in love with a South African actress, Zanele, who must leave to go on her own literary adventure to London.

When the ship is sent up the coast to repair a series of major underwater breaks, both men learn that the very cables they seek to fix carry the news that may cause their lives to unravel. At sea, they are forced to confront the most elemental questions of life, love, absence, belonging, and the perils of our severed connections. Can we, in our fractured world, reweave ourselves out of the thin, broken threads of our pasts? Can the ruptured things awaken us from our despair?

Resoundingly simple and turbulent at the same time, Twist is a meditation on the nature of narrative and truth from one of the great storytellers of our times.

A propulsive novel of rupture and repair in the digital age, delving into a hidden world deep under the ocean--from the New York Times bestselling author of Apeirogon and Let the Great World Spin

The spirit of Joseph Conrad hovers over the text, but here the heart of darkness lies at the bottom of the ocean.--Salman Rushdie

Everything gets fixed, and we all stay broken.

Anthony Fennell, an Irish journalist and playwright, is assigned to cover the underwater cables that carry the world's information. The sum of human existence--words, images, transactions, memes, voices, viruses--travels through the tiny fiber-optic tubes. But sometimes the tubes break, at an unfathomable depth.

Fennell's journey brings him to the west coast of Africa, where he uncovers a story about the raw human labor behind the dazzling veneer of the technological world. He meets a fellow Irishman, John Conway, the chief of mission on a cable repair ship. The mysterious Conway is a skilled engineer and a freediver capable of reaching extraordinary depths. He is also in love with a South African actress, Zanele, who must leave to go on her own literary adventure to London.

When the ship is sent up the coast to repair a series of major underwater breaks, both men learn that the very cables they seek to fix carry the news that may cause their lives to unravel. At sea, they are forced to confront the most elemental questions of life, love, absence, belonging, and the perils of our severed connections. Can we, in our fractured world, reweave ourselves out of the thin, broken threads of our pasts? Can the ruptured things awaken us from our despair?

Resoundingly simple and turbulent at the same time, Twist is a meditation on the nature of narrative and truth from one of the great storytellers of our times.

NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER - Colum McCann's beloved novel inspired by Philippe Petit's daring high-wire stunt, which is also depicted in the film The Walk starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt

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.

Praise for Let the Great World Spin

This is a gorgeous book, multilayered and deeply felt, and it's a damned lot of fun to read, too. Leave it to an Irishman to write one of the greatest-ever novels about New York. There's so much passion and humor and pure lifeforce on every page of Let the Great World Spin that you'll find yourself giddy, dizzy, overwhelmed.--Dave Eggers

Stunning . . . an] elegiac glimpse of hope . . . It's a novel rooted firmly in time and place. It vividly captures New York at its worst and best. But it transcends all that. In the end, it's a novel about families--the ones we're born into and the ones we make for ourselves.--USA Today

The first great 9/11 novel . . . We are all dancing on the wire of history, and even on solid ground we breathe the thinnest of air.--Esquire

Mesmerizing . . . a Joycean look at the lives of New Yorkers changed by a single act on a single day . . . Colum McCann's marvelously rich novel . . . weaves a portrait of a city and a moment, dizzyingly satisfying to read and difficult to put down.--The Seattle Times

Vibrantly whole . . . With a series of spare, gorgeously wrought vignettes, Colum McCann brings 1970s New York to life. . . . And as always, McCann's heart-stoppingly simple descriptions wow.--Entertainment Weekly

An act of pure bravado, dizzying proof that to keep your balance you need to know how to fall.--O: The Oprah Magazine

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - An epic novel rooted in the unlikely real-life friendship between two fathers--one Palestinian, one Israeli, both connected by grief and working together for peace--from the National Book Award-winning and bestselling author of Let the Great World Spin

A quite extraordinary novel. Colum McCann has found the form and voice to tell the most complex of stories, with an unexpected friendship between two men at its powerfully beating heart.--Kamila Shamsie, author of Home Fire

FINALIST FOR THE DUBLIN LITERARY AWARD - LONGLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE - WINNER OF THE NATIONAL JEWISH BOOK AWARD - NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The Independent - The New York Public Library - Library Journal

Bassam Aramin is Palestinian. Rami Elhanan is Israeli. They inhabit a world of conflict that colors every aspect of their lives, from the roads they are allowed to drive on to the schools their children attend to the checkpoints, both physical and emotional, they must negotiate.

But their lives, however circumscribed, are upended one after the other: first, Rami's thirteen-year-old daughter, Smadar, becomes the victim of suicide bombers; a decade later, Bassam's ten-year-old daughter, Abir, is killed by a rubber bullet. Rami and Bassam had been raised to hate one another. And yet, when they learn of each other's stories, they recognize the loss that connects them. Together they attempt to use their grief as a weapon for peace--and with their one small act, start to permeate what has for generations seemed an impermeable conflict.

This extraordinary novel is the fruit of a seed planted when the novelist Colum McCann met the real Bassam and Rami on a trip with the non-profit organization Narrative 4. McCann was moved by their willingness to share their stories with the world, by their hope that if they could see themselves in one another, perhaps others could too.

With their blessing, and unprecedented access to their families, lives, and personal recollections, McCann began to craft Apeirogon, which uses their real-life stories to begin another--one that crosses centuries and continents, stitching together time, art, history, nature, and politics in a tale both heartbreaking and hopeful. The result is an ambitious novel, crafted out of a universe of fictional and nonfictional material, with these fathers' moving story at its heart.

One of the best books I've read in many, many years, if not in my life.--Anderson Cooper

Featured on MSNBC's Morning Joe

What does a mother say to the person responsible for kidnapping, torturing, and murdering her son? National Book Award-winning author Colum McCann channels Diane Foley's voice as she tells her story, as the mother of American journalist Jim Foley - in search of answers, beyond justice, found through dogged, empathetic, spiritual enquiry.

In late 2021, Diane Foley sat at a table across from her son's killer, Alexanda Kotey, a member of the ISIS group known as The Beatles who plead guilty to the kidnapping, torture, and murder of her son seven years before. Kotey was about to go serve life imprisonment and this was Diane's chance to talk to the man who had been involved with brutally taking her son's last breath. What would she say to his killer? What would he reveal to her? Might she even be able to summon forgiveness for him?

So begins American Mother-- which reads alternately like a thriller, a biography, a mystery, a memoir, and a literary examination of grace.

Diane looks back on the early days when Jim was a child and his journey to journalism, and the killing fields of the world where he reports with indefatigable determination and insight on the plight of those caught up in the agonies of war. She guides us through her family history and the difficulties they faced when Jim was captured. And she also charts the tenacity it takes to turn her grief into grace as she seeks to give voice to those who are still being kidnapped and wrongfully detained around the world.

Few journeys are more worthy than this and, in this astonishing book, we are all invited to celebrate the lives of those who are never, in the end, gone.

AN IMMEDIATE INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER * Featured on MSNBC's Morning Joe

With National Book Award-winning author Colum McCann, Diane Foley courageously returns to the story of her son, American journalist James Foley, who went abroad and never came home.

In late 2021, Diane Foley sat at a table across from Alexanda Kotey, a member of the ISIS group known as the Beatles, who pled guilty to the kidnapping, torture, and murder of her son James Foley seven years before. She asked the legendary writer Colum McCann to be there.

One of the best books I've read in many, many years, if not my life. -Anderson Cooper

A work of great faith and redemption. Here is a woman making the whole world accessible to us all. -Jamie Lee Curtis

A spectacular tale of violence and forgiveness. -Salman Rushdie

Foley's urge to understand the psychology of one of her son's captors made her a perfect match for McCann. -The New York Times

A book that will shake your soul out. -Sting

A call to decency in a war-torn world. -Deborah Jackson Taffa

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - LONGLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE - NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY KIRKUS REVIEWS

In the National Book Award-winning Let the Great World Spin, Colum McCann thrilled readers with a marvelous high-wire act of fiction that The New York Times Book Review called an emotional tour de force. Now McCann demonstrates once again why he is one of the most acclaimed and essential authors of his generation with a soaring novel that spans continents, leaps centuries, and unites a cast of deftly rendered characters, both real and imagined.

Newfoundland, 1919. Two aviators--Jack Alcock and Arthur Brown--set course for Ireland as they attempt the first nonstop flight across the Atlantic Ocean, placing their trust in a modified bomber to heal the wounds of the Great War.

Dublin, 1845 and '46. On an international lecture tour in support of his subversive autobiography, Frederick Douglass finds the Irish people sympathetic to the abolitionist cause--despite the fact that, as famine ravages the countryside, the poor suffer from hardships that are astonishing even to an American slave.

New York, 1998. Leaving behind a young wife and newborn child, Senator George Mitchell departs for Belfast, where it has fallen to him, the son of an Irish-American father and a Lebanese mother, to shepherd Northern Ireland's notoriously bitter and volatile peace talks to an uncertain conclusion.

These three iconic crossings are connected by a series of remarkable women whose personal stories are caught up in the swells of history. Beginning with Irish housemaid Lily Duggan, who crosses paths with Frederick Douglass, the novel follows her daughter and granddaughter, Emily and Lottie, and culminates in the present-day story of Hannah Carson, in whom all the hopes and failures of previous generations live on. From the loughs of Ireland to the flatlands of Missouri and the windswept coast of Newfoundland, their journeys mirror the progress and shape of history. They each learn that even the most unassuming moments of grace have a way of rippling through time, space, and memory.

The most mature work yet from an incomparable storyteller, TransAtlantic is a profound meditation on identity and history in a wide world that grows somehow smaller and more wondrous with each passing year.

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A dazzlingly talented author's latest high-wire act . . . Reminiscent of the finest work of Michael Ondaatje and Michael Cunningham, TransAtlantic is Colum McCann's most penetrating novel yet.--O: The Oprah Magazine

One of the greatest pleasures of TransAtlantic is how provisional it makes history feel, how intimate, and intensely real. . . . Here is the uncanny thing McCann finds again and again about the miraculous: that it is inseparable from the everyday.--The Boston Globe

Ingenious . . . The intricate connections McCann] has crafted between the stories of his women and our men seem] written in air, in water, and--given that his subject is the confluence of Irish and American history--in blood.--Esquire

Another sweeping, beautifully constructed tapestry of life . . . Reading McCann is a rare joy.--The Seattle Times

Entrancing . . . McCann folds his epic meticulously into this relatively slim volume like an accordion; each pleat holds music--elation and sorrow.--The Denver Post

From the author of Songdogs, a magnificent work of imagination and history set in the tunnels of New York City.

In the early years of the century, Nathan Walker leaves his native Georgia for New York City and the most dangerous job in America. A sandhog, he burrows beneath the East River, digging the tunnel that will carry trains from Brooklyn to Manhattan. Above ground, the sandhogs--black, white, Irish, Italian--keep their distance from each other until a spectacular accident welds a bond between Walker and his fellow diggers--a bond that will bless and curse the next three generations.

Years later, Treefrog, a homeless man driven below by a shameful secret, endures a punishing winter in his subway nest. In tones ranging from bleak to disturbingly funny, Treefrog recounts his strategies of survival--killing rats, scavenging for discarded soda cans, washing in the snow. Between Nathan Walker and Treefrog stretch seventy years of ill-fated loves and unintended crimes.

In a triumph of plotting, the two stories fuse to form a tale of family, race, and redemption that is as bold and fabulous as New York City itself. In This Side of Brightness, Colum McCann confirms his place in the front ranks of modern writers.

Taking his inspiration from biographical facts, novelist Colum McCann tells the erotically charged story of the Russian dancer Rudolf Nureyev through the cast of those who knew him

There is Anna Vasileva, Rudi's first ballet teacher, who rescues her prot g from the stunted life of his provincial town; Yulia, whose sexual and artistic ambitions are thwarted by her Soviet-sanctioned marriage; and Victor, the Venezuelan street hustler, who reveals the lurid underside of the gay celebrity set.

Spanning four decades and many worlds, from the horrors of the Second World War to the wild abandon of New York in the eighties, Dancer is peopled by a large cast of characters, obscure and famous: doormen and shoemakers, nurses and translators, Margot Fonteyn, Eric Bruhn and John Lennon. And at the heart of the spectacle stands the artist himself, willful, lustful, and driven by a never-to-be-met need for perfection.

Colum McCann creates in Songdogs a mesmerizing evocation of the gulf between memory and imagination, love and loss, past and present.

With unreliable memories and scraps of photographs as his only clues, Conor Lyons follows in the tracks of his father, a rootless photographer, as he moved from war-torn Spain, to the barren plains of Mexico, where he met and married Conor's mother, to the American West, and finally back to Ireland, where the marriage and the story reach their heartrending climax. The narratives of Conor's quest and his parents' lives twine and untwine to astonishing effect.

An early collection by the National Book Award-winning author of Let the Great World Spin and Apeirogon

This devastating early collection from Colum McCann finds the National Book Award-winning author of Let the Great World Spin already exploring one of his most enduring themes: the reverberations of political violence in individual lives.

The setting is McCann's native Ireland in the time of the Troubles, a conflict that manifests both brutally and subtly in everyday life. In the title story, a teenage girl struggles to reconcile her gratitude to the British soldiers who saved the family's horse with her Catholic upbringing. Wood, which first appeared in The New Yorker, depicts a boy attempting to help the Protestants under the nose of his blind, disapproving father. And in solidarity with his uncle, an imprisoned confederate of Bobby Sands, the teenage narrator of Hunger Strike mounts a resistance of his own.

Each story displays McCann's unique ability to capture the costs, emotional and psychological as well as physical, of violence, and reminds readers why he's been lauded as one of the most compassionate writers alive (Air Mail).

NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY CHICAGO TRIBUNE AND ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New York Times Book Review - NPR - Los Angeles Times - The Boston Globe - The Seattle Times - The Independent

In such acclaimed novels as Let the Great World Spin and TransAtlantic, National Book Award-winning author Colum McCann has transfixed readers with his precision, tenderness, and authority. Now, in his first collection of short fiction in more than a decade, McCann charts the territory of chance, and the profound and intimate consequences of even our smallest moments.

As it was, it was like being set down in the best of poems, carried into a cold landscape, blindfolded, turned around, unblindfolded, forced, then, to invent new ways of seeing.

In the exuberant title novella, a retired judge reflects on his life's work, unaware as he goes about his daily routines that this particular morning will be his last. In Sh'khol, a mother spending Christmas alone with her son confronts the unthinkable when he disappears while swimming off the coast near their home in Ireland. In Treaty, an elderly nun catches a snippet of a news report in which it is revealed that the man who once kidnapped and brutalized her is alive, masquerading as an agent of peace. And in What Time Is It Now, Where You Are? a writer constructs a story about a Marine in Afghanistan calling home on New Year's Eve.

Deeply personal, subtly subversive, at times harrowing, and indeed funny, yet also full of comfort, Thirteen Ways of Looking is a striking achievement. With unsurpassed empathy for his characters and their inner lives, Colum McCann forges from their stories a profound tribute to our search for meaning and grace. The collection is a rumination on the power of storytelling in a world where language and memory can sometimes falter, but in the end do not fail us, and a contemplation of the healing power of literature.

Praise for Thirteen Ways of Looking

Extraordinary . . . incandescent.--Chicago Tribune

The irreducible mystery of human experience ties this small collection together, and in each of these stories McCann explores that theme in some strikingly effective ways. . . . The first story] is as fascinating as it is poignant. . . . The second] captures the mundane and mysterious aspects of shaping characters from the gray clay of words, placing them in realistic settings and breathing life into their lungs. . . . That he makes the story so emotionally compelling is a sign of his genius. . . . The most remarkable piece] is Sh'khol. . . . Caught in the rushing currents of this drama, you know you're reading a little masterpiece.--The Washington Post

McCann is a writer of power and subtlety and beauty. . . . The powerful title story loiters in the mind long after you've read it.--Sarah Lyall, The New York Times

McCann] unspools complex and unforgettable stories in this, his first collection in more than a decade.--The Boston Globe

McCann is a passionate writer whose impulse is always toward a generous understanding of his diverse characters.--The Wall Street Journal

Powerful, profound, and deeply empathetic, McCann's beautifully wrought writing in Thirteen Ways of Looking glides off the page.--BuzzFeed

McCann weaves the magic that made Let the Great World Spin so acclaimed.--The Huffington Post

From the National Book Award-winning author of Let the Great World Spin, this haunting novel is an examination of intimacy and betrayal in a community rarely captured so vibrantly in contemporary literature.

NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE WASHINGTON POST AND THE CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR

Zoli Novotna, a young woman raised in the traveling Gypsy tradition, is a poet by accident as much as desire. As 1930s fascism spreads over Czechoslovakia, Zoli and her grandfather flee to join a clan of fellow Romani harpists. Sharpened by the world of books, which is often frowned upon in the Romani tradition, Zoli becomes the poster girl for a brave new world. As she shapes the ancient songs to her times, she finds her gift embraced by the Gypsy people and savored by a young English expatriate, Stephen Swann.

But Zoli soon finds that when she falls she cannot fall halfway-neither in love nor in politics. While Zoli's fame and poetic skills deepen, the ruling Communists begin to use her for their own favor. Cast out from her family, Zoli abandons her past to journey to the West, in a novel that spans the 20th century and travels the breadth of Europe.

Colum McCann has created a sensuous novel about exile, belonging and survival, based loosely on the true story of the Romani poet Papusza. It spans the twentieth century and travels the breadth of Europe. In the tradition of Steinbeck, Coetzee, and Ondaatje, McCann finds the art inherent in social and political history, while vividly depicting how far one gifted woman must journey to find where she belongs.

Praise for Zoli

Very powerful . . . rich in vivid detail . . . the prose is just plain gorgeous. . . . McCann allows us to enter a world few of us know anything about.--San Francisco Chronicle

A] beautifully written novel] loosely based on the life of the Polish Gypsy poet 'Papusza, ' who lived throughout most of the twentieth century. . . . Beautifully conceived, wonderfully told, the story is proof of an indomitable spirit. The elusive character of Zoli, the brilliang artist, is unforgettable.--The Washington Post Book World

McCann is a writer of large and driving vision. . . . Zoli] contains passages of stunning lyricism and sharp ironic force.--The New York Times

Rich and sensuous . . . McCann's research and lustrous prose bring Zoli vibrantly alive.--Entertainment Weekly

From the bestselling author of the National Book Award winner Let the Great World Spin comes a lesson in how to be a writer--and so much more than that.

Intriguing and inspirational, this book is a call to look outward rather than inward. McCann asks his readers to constantly push the boundaries of experience, to see empathy and wonder in the stories we craft and hear.

A paean to the power of language, both by argument and by example, Letters to a Young Writer is fierce and honest in its testament to the bruises delivered by writing as both a profession and a calling. It charges aspiring writers to learn the rules and even break them.

These fifty-two essays are ultimately a profound challenge to a new generation to bring truth and light to a dark world through their art.

Eighty pieces of short fiction and nonfiction on manhood by some of the world's best writers, presented by Colum McCann, Esquire, and Narrative 4.

To help launch the literary nonprofit Narrative 4, Esquire asked eighty of the world's greatest writers to chip in with a story, all with the title, How to Be a Man.

The result is The Book of Men, an unflinching investigation into the essence of masculinity.

The Book of Men probes, with the poignant honesty and imagination that only these writers could deliver, the slippery condition of manhood. You will find men striving and searching, learning and failing to learn, triumphing and aspiring; men who are lost and men navigating their way toward redemption. These stories don't just explore what it is to be a man or how to achieve manliness, but ultimately what it is to be a human--with all of its uncertainty, complexity, clumsiness, and beauty.

With contributions from literary luminaries as diverse as the subjects they capture, and curated by the editors of Esquire, National Book Award winner Colum McCann, and Narrative 4, a global nonprofit devoted to using storytelling as a means to empathy, The Book of Men might not teach you how to negotiate a deal or mix a Manhattan, but it does scratch at that most eternal of questions: What is a man?