NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • 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 LONGLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE •
From the National Book Award-winning and bestselling author of Let the Great World Spin comes
an epic novel rooted in the unlikely real-life friendship between two fathers. 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.
