Let the Great World Spin

Raised in Dublin and relocated to New York City, the Irish novelist Colum McCann has been confined in his fiction to no one place, time, or culture. His novel Zoli chronicled a fictional woman poet of the Romani people, while Dancer wove its wide research into the intimately imagined story of Rudolf Nureyev, the driven ballet genius born into Soviet poverty. In an earlier novel, This Side of Brightness, McCann explored the tunnels that run beneath Manhattan, using them as a landscape, a window onto history, and a symbol of life that carries on out of sight, in spite of society's best effort to neglect it.