National Book Award Winner
I’ve always been a little skeptical of fiction written in more than one or two different voices. Maybe three, max. It seems, outwardly, like a cop-out for a writer’s inability to bring the work into focus. Not so, with Colum McCann’s Let the Great World Spin, which recently won the National Book Award. McCann illuminates the lives of a handful of fictional New Yorkers on a single day in 1974, when Philippe Petit walked the tightrope between the Twin Towers (though the story isn’t really about that event). McCann tells this story in a way that is not in the least scattered feeling, and with language that is at once beautiful and purposeful. He does so in a way that makes me feel like I’ve been to New York City (I haven’t). This one deserves to be on your list of books to read soon. You won’t be sorry.
—Let the Great World Spin, by Colum McCann (Random House, $15) IN STOCK
