TransAtlantic: A Novel [Kindle Edition] Author: Colum Mccann | Language: English | ISBN:
B00ALBR2RW | Format: PDF, EPUB
TransAtlantic: A Novel Epub Free
Download electronic versions of selected books TransAtlantic: A Novel Epub Free from mediafire, rapishare, and mirror link NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • LONGLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY KIRKUS REVIEWS
In the National Book Award–winning Let the Great World Spin, Colum McCann thrilled readers with a marvelous high-wire act of fiction that The New York Times Book Review called“an emotional tour de force.” Now McCann demonstrates once again why he is one of the most acclaimed and essential authors of his generation with a soaring novel that spans continents, leaps centuries, and unites a cast of deftly rendered characters, both real and imagined.
Newfoundland, 1919. Two aviators—Jack Alcock and Arthur Brown—set course for Ireland as they attempt the first nonstop flight across the Atlantic Ocean, placing their trust in a modified bomber to heal the wounds of the Great War.
Dublin, 1845 and ’46. On an international lecture tour in support of his subversive autobiography, Frederick Douglass finds the Irish people sympathetic to the abolitionist cause—despite the fact that, as famine ravages the countryside, the poor suffer from hardships that are astonishing even to an American slave.
New York, 1998. Leaving behind a young wife and newborn child, Senator George Mitchell departs for Belfast, where it has fallen to him, the son of an Irish-American father and a Lebanese mother, to shepherd Northern Ireland’s notoriously bitter and volatile peace talks to an uncertain conclusion.
These three iconic crossings are connected by a series of remarkable women whose personal stories are caught up in the swells of history. Beginning with Irish housemaid Lily Duggan, who crosses paths with Frederick Douglass, the novel follows her daughter and granddaughter, Emily and Lottie, and culminates in the present-day story of Hannah Carson, in whom all the hopes and failures of previous generations live on. From the loughs of Ireland to the flatlands of Missouri and the windswept coast of Newfoundland, their journeys mirror the progress and shape of history. They each learn that even the most unassuming moments of grace have a way of rippling through time, space, and memory.
The most mature work yet from an incomparable storyteller, TransAtlantic is a profound meditation on identity and history in a wide world that grows somehow smaller and more wondrous with each passing year.
Praise for TransAtlantic
“A dazzlingly talented author’s latest high-wire act . . . Reminiscent of the finest work of Michael Ondaatje and Michael Cunningham, TransAtlantic is Colum McCann’s most penetrating novel yet.”—O: The Oprah Magazine
“One of the greatest pleasures of TransAtlantic is how provisional it makes history feel, how intimate, and intensely real. . . . Here is the uncanny thing McCann finds again and again about the miraculous: that it is inseparable from the everyday.”—The Boston Globe
“Ingenious . . . The intricate connections [McCann] has crafted between the stories of his women and our men [seem] written in air, in water, and—given that his subject is the confluence of Irish and American history—in blood.”—Esquire
“Another sweeping, beautifully constructed tapestry of life . . . Reading McCann is a rare joy.”—The Seattle Times
“Entrancing . . . McCann folds his epic meticulously into this relatively slim volume like an accordion; each pleat holds music—elation and sorrow.”—The Denver Post
From the Hardcover edition. Download latest books on mediafire and other links compilation TransAtlantic: A Novel [Kindle Edition] Epub Free
- File Size: 1235 KB
- Print Length: 321 pages
- Page Numbers Source ISBN: 1400069599
- Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks (June 4, 2013)
- Sold by: Random House LLC
- Language: English
- ASIN: B00ALBR2RW
- Text-to-Speech: Enabled
X-Ray:
- Lending: Not Enabled
- Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,108 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
- #27
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Literature & Fiction > Literary Fiction > Sagas - #46
in Books > Literature & Fiction > World Literature - #62
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Literature & Fiction > Literary Fiction > Historical
- #27
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Literature & Fiction > Literary Fiction > Sagas - #46
in Books > Literature & Fiction > World Literature - #62
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Literature & Fiction > Literary Fiction > Historical
As in LET THE GREAT WORLD SPIN, McCann's new novel begins with a real event in the air, and uses the opening narrative as a camera lens, tilting this way and that and keeping us off balance while images assemble to create a defining scene. British aviators John Alcock and Arthur (Teddy) Whitten Brown are up in the air in their WW1 Vickers Vimy at the start of this tale, the pair who made the historical transatlantic journey from Newfoundland to Ireland in 1919. It could be said that the novel begins in medias res, and the reader is installed in an already evolving story that takes place from 1845 to the present. It is told through a non-linear progress of evolving images, events, and generations of people.
But, wait, I need to go back to the image in the prologue--to a house, and a woman listening to the sounds that define the house's character. By the time we make the symmetrical return to the house at the end of the book, its image has been altered and given much gravitas by the external events that precede it. The whole of the novel is most elegantly the sum of its parts. This isn't evident for a while, because the separate generations' stories are rendered with zoomed-in effect, and the camera gradually pulls out to connect the different stories together. Later, as the varying threads and initially unrelated perspectives go back and forth a few times, we see the integration of stories and generations into a panoramic whole. The factual characters and events heighten the poignancy of the fictional ones.
The graceful symmetry of the novel's harmonious and measured structure is one of the elements of this genre-blurring fiction that McCann is so noted for. He seamlessly weaves biographical people and events with the seemingly ordinary characters that populate the story.
(4.5 stars) Always precise and insightful in his descriptions, and so in tune with his settings that they seem to breathe with his characters, Irish author Colum McCann uses three different plot lines set in three different time periods to begin this new novel, and all three plots are connected intimately to Ireland. In the process, he also creates a powerful sense of how men and women, no matter where they start out, may become so inspired to reach seemingly impossible goals that they willingly risk all, including their lives, to achieve success, often in new places, away from "home." Always, however, they remain connected to their pasts.
The imagery of flight which reappears throughout the novel comes from events which take place in Book One, set in 1919. John "Jack" Alcock and Arthur "Teddy" Brown, real characters, are readying themselves to become the first pilots to fly across the Atlantic Ocean, non-stop, in less than seventy-two hours. Both men, veterans of the First World war, want a clean slate, "the obliteration of memory." By making a few adjustments to the Vickers Vimy they know so well, "they [will be] using the bomber in a brand-new way: they were taking the war out of the plane, stripping the whole thing of its penchant for carnage," and opening whole new worlds of possibility. When the two aviators take off, a local photographer, Lottie Erlich, persuades Brown to hand-carry a letter written by her mother Emily to a family in Cork. (The Ehrlich family will eventually connect all the major plot lines throughout the book, and the letter will become a motif which develops further.) As the Alcock-Brown trip in this open-cockpit plane begins, the reader becomes totally involved in the excitement and danger. For Alcock and Brown, "The point of flight. To get rid of oneself.
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