New York, NY: Random House (2014)

Paperback. Signed.

National Book Award-winning novelist Colum McCann’s “rare and wondrous” New York Times bestseller, bringing together four generations of heartbreaking, unforgettable women with some of the most significant men in Irish-American history.

In 1845 a black American slave lands in Ireland to champion ideas of democracy and freedom, only to find a famine unfurling at his feet. In 1919, two brave young airmen emerge from the carnage of World War One to pilot the very first transatlantic flight from Newfoundland to the west of Ireland. And in 1998 an American senator criss-crosses the ocean in search of a lasting Irish peace. Bearing witness to these history-making moments of Frederick Douglass, John Alcock and “Teddy” Brown, and George Mitchell, and braiding the story together into one epic tale, are four generations of women from a matriarchal clan, beginning with Irish housemaid Lily Duggan. In this story of dark and light, men and women, history and past, fiction and fact, Colum McCann delivers a tour de force that is his most spectacular achievement to date.

COLUM MCCANN is the author of the novels Zoli, Dancer, This Side of Brightness, and Songdogs, as well as two story collections. He has been a finalist for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and was the inaugural winner of the Ireland Fund of Monaco Literary Award. A contributor to The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, and The Paris Review, he teaches in the Hunter College MFA Creative Writing Program.