Let the Great World Spin (English)

In this dazzlingly unique novel, Colum McCann examines the trajectories of the lives of several people whose lives twist and converge around one man's transgressive act of courage--a tightrope walk between the twin towers of the World Trade Center. While this figure is known only as "the tightrope walker," he is obviously based on Philippe Petit, who performed the outrageous stunt in 1974, an event commemorated in the popular 2008 documentary, MAN ON WIRE. In McCann's novel, this extraordinary feat initiates a chain of events which will forever alter the lives of an eclectic mix of characters, including an Irish monk, a mother and daughter pair of prostitutes, an artist guilty of a hit-and-run, and a support group of mothers who lost their sons in Vietnam. Like a rock lobbed into calm waters, a single momentous act causes ripples whose individual effects are more profound and more enduring than that of the initial splash. minimize