NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER • Colum McCann's beloved novel inspired by Philippe Petit's daring
high-wire stunt which is also depicted in the film The Walk starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt 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. Praise for
Let the Great World Spin "This is a gorgeous book multilayered and deeply felt and it's a
damned lot of fun to read too. Leave it to an Irishman to write one of the greatest-ever
novels about New York. There's so much passion and humor and pure lifeforce on every page of
Let the Great World Spin that you'll find yourself giddy dizzy overwhelmed."-Dave Eggers
"Stunning . . . [an] elegiac glimpse of hope . . . It's a novel rooted firmly in time and
place. It vividly captures New York at its worst and best. But it transcends all that. In the
end it's a novel about families-the ones we're born into and the ones we make for
ourselves."-USA Today "The first great 9 11 novel . . . We are all dancing on the wire of
history and even on solid ground we breathe the thinnest of air."-Esquire "Mesmerizing . . .
a Joycean look at the lives of New Yorkers changed by a single act on a single day . . . Colum
McCann's marvelously rich novel . . . weaves a portrait of a city and a moment dizzyingly
satisfying to read and difficult to put down."-The Seattle Times "Vibrantly whole . . . With
a series of spare gorgeously wrought vignettes Colum McCann brings 1970s New York to life. .
. . And as always McCann's heart-stoppingly simple descriptions wow."-Entertainment Weekly
"An act of pure bravado dizzying proof that to keep your balance you need to know how to
fall."-O: The Oprah Magazine
