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National Book Award for Fiction 2009
Let the great world spin
a novel
349 pages
A sweeping, polyphonic love letter to a gritty 1970s New York, where disparate lives are briefly united by a single moment of impossible beauty.
What it feels like
Reading this novel feels like standing on a busy street corner in 1970s New York, surrounded by the noise, the grit, and sudden, breathtaking moments of grace. The pace is steady and deeply immersive, weaving a polyphonic tapestry of voices that range from a radical Irish monk to grieving Park Avenue mothers. The prose is lyrical and fiercely empathetic, capturing the distinct cadence of each character's soul without ever feeling forced. The mood balances heavy melancholy with a soaring, awe-struck hope, mirroring the tightrope walk at the story's center. It is a book for readers who crave sprawling, interconnected literary fiction that explores how strangers are tethered together by grief, love, and the shared experience of witnessing the impossible.
- Mood
- gritty
- melancholic
- awe-struck
- atmospheric
- Tone
- empathetic
- elegiac
- earnest
- lyrical
- Pace
- steady
- Themes
- interconnectedness of humanity · urban isolation · processing grief · finding beauty in tragedy · the weight of history
- The writing
- Lyrical, polyphonic, and deeply empathetic, shifting seamlessly between distinct, authentic voices.
- The arc
- Moves from fractured, isolated struggles through a shared moment of breathtaking awe, culminating in a sense of fragile, hard-won grace.
- Who it's for
- Readers who love sprawling, character-driven literary fiction that captures the gritty soul of a city and the invisible threads connecting strangers.
Content notes
- grief and loss
- sex work
- drug addiction
- fatal accidents
- poverty
About the book
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. From the Hardcover edition.
Description from Open Library.
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