Fantastic book with gorgeous writing: Colum McCann's 'Let the Whole World Spin'. Not to be missed.

Recently stayed up half the night delving into this work, "Let the Great World Spin", just named National Book Award Winner of 2009. I was hooked by the writer's talent by page two. If, like me, you love a writer that knows how to turn a phrase, intrigue the reader, and describes people and places with what seem at first simple, yet are so dead on and actually magical, words you should definitely pick up a copy of this book soon. Run, don't walk. Now in trade paperback at all the usual places.


from Amazon's review: Colum McCann has worked some exquisite magic with Let the Great World Spin, conjuring a novel of electromagnetic force that defies gravity. It's August of 1974, a summer "hot and serious and full of death and betrayal," and Watergate and the Vietnam War make the world feel precarious. A stunned hush pauses the cacophonous universe of New York City as a man on a cable walks (repeatedly) between World Trade Center towers. This extraordinary, real-life feat by French funambulist Philippe Petit becomes the touchstone for stories that briefly submerge you in ten varied and intense lives--a street priest, heroin-addicted hookers, mothers mourning sons lost in war, young artists, a Park Avenue judge. All their lives are ordinary and unforgettable, overlapping at the edges, occasionally converging. And when they coalesce in the final pages, the moment hums with such grace that its memory might tighten your throat weeks later.


I wholeheartedly agree.



See Colum McCann's acceptance speech here>>> 


Colum McCann at the 2009 National Book Awards, Fiction Winner from National Book Foundation on Vimeo.