Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann
![Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann](https://static.oprah.com/images/200907/omag/200907-omag-book-mccann-220x312.jpg)
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The free offer to download Colum McCann's irresistible new novel, Let the Great World Spin has
expired, but you can start reading the first chapter of the book today.
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Chapter 1
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Colum McCann wants to hear from you! He'll be taking questions from Oprah.com readers about Let the Great World Spin through the end of this week.
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O, The Oprah Magazine says:
It's 1974, and a man is dancing on a tightrope between the towers of the World Trade Center—risky business, but as Colum McCann reveals in Let the Great World Spin (Random House), so is simply living day to day. This novel, with its web of disparate but connected characters—including a God-battered Irish monk, a swashbuckling prostitute, an artist with a guilty secret, a mother grieving her war dead—is an act of pure bravado, dizzying proof that to keep your balance you need to know how to fall.
Read more about the book
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This book is one of O's 25 Books of Summer. Get the complete summer reading list, plus:
Ask the Author
Colum McCann wants to hear from you! He'll be taking questions from Oprah.com readers about Let the Great World Spin through the end of this week.
Submit your question for Colum
O, The Oprah Magazine says:
It's 1974, and a man is dancing on a tightrope between the towers of the World Trade Center—risky business, but as Colum McCann reveals in Let the Great World Spin (Random House), so is simply living day to day. This novel, with its web of disparate but connected characters—including a God-battered Irish monk, a swashbuckling prostitute, an artist with a guilty secret, a mother grieving her war dead—is an act of pure bravado, dizzying proof that to keep your balance you need to know how to fall.
Read more about the book
Let the Great World Spin is available for purchase at::
Amazon.com
BarnesandNoble.com
Borders.com
IndieBound.com
Powells.com
RandomHouse.com
Walmart.com
![Beach read](https://static.oprah.com/images/200907/omag/200907-omag-beach-read-120x90.jpg)
About the Book: 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.
This book is one of the 25 Books of Summer
Get the complete list
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.
![Beach read](https://static.oprah.com/images/200907/omag/200907-omag-beach-read-66x66.jpg)
Get the complete list