Colum McCann

Newfoundland, 1919: Two aviators set course for Ireland as they attempt the first nonstop transatlantic flight in a modified bomber. Dublin 1845-846: On an international lecture tour, Frederick Douglass finds the Irish people sympathetic to the abolitionist cause. New York, 1998: Senator George Mitchell departs for Belfast to shepherd Northern Ireland's volatile peace talks. These three iconic crossings are connected by a series of remarkable women....

A rich vision of the pain, loveliness, mystery, and promise of New York City in the 1970s. 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 gathers 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...

Colum McCann's Everything in This Country Must, a writer of fierce originality and haunting lyricism, turns to the troubles in Northern Ireland and reveals the reverberations of political tragedy in the most intimate lives of men and women, parents and children. In the title story, a teenage girl must choose between allegiance to her Catholic father and gratitude to the British soldiers who have saved the family's horse. The young hero of Hunger...

The short fiction of Colum McCann documents a dizzying cast of characters in exile, loss, love, and displacement. There is the worn boxing champion who steals clothes from a New Orleans laundromat, the rumored survivor of Hiroshima who emigrates to the tranquil coast of Western Ireland, the Irishwoman who journeys through America in search of silence and solitude. But what is found in these stories, and discovered by these characters, is the astonishing...

"Bassam Aramin is Palestinian. Rami Elhanan is Israeli. They inhabit a world of intractable conflict that colors every aspect of their daily lives, from the roads they are allowed to take to the schools their daughters, Abir and Smadar, each attend. Theirs is a life in which children from both sides of the wall throw stones at one another. But their worlds shift irreparably when ten-year-old old Abir is killed by a rubber bullet meant to quell unruly...

When an Irish immigrant is killed, building the 1910s New York subway, a black co-worker supports his family, marrying the widow. The story is contrasted with today's subway, a place not of hope, but despair.

"Anthony Fennell, an Irish journalist and playwright, is assigned to cover the story of the underwater cables that carry the world's information. The sum of human existence-words, images, transactions, memes, voices, viruses-travels through the tiny fiberoptic tubes. But sometimes the tubes break at an unfathomable depth. Fennell's literary adventure brings him to the west coast of Africa where he uncovers a story about the raw human labor behind...