Books by Colum McCann
Zoli
Random House, 2007
A major new novel about a Gypsy woman exiled for betraying her people: the novel begins in Czechoslovakia in the early 1930s when Zoli, a young Roma girl, is six years old. The fascist Hlinka guards had driven most of her people out onto the frozen lake and forced them to stay there until the spring, when the ice cracked and everyone drowned - Zoli's parents, brothers and sisters. Now she and her grandfather head off in search of a 'company'...[more]
Dancer
(Picador, 2004)
Taking his inspiration from biographical facts, novelist Colum McCann tells the erotically charged story of the Russian dancer Rudolf Nureyev through the cast of those who knew him: there is Anna Vasileva, Rudi's first ballet teacher, who rescues her protégé from the stunted life of his provincial town; Yulia, whose sexual and artistic ambitions are thwarted by her Soviet-sanctioned marriage; and Victor, the Venezuelan street hustler, who reveals the lurid underside of the gay celebrity set...[more]
Everything in This Country Must
A Novella and Two Stories
(Picador, 2004)
In his fourth book, Colum McCann turns to the "troubles" in Northern Ireland and reveals the reverberations of political tragedy in the most intimate lives of men and women, parents and children. In the title story, a teenage girl must choose between allegiance to her Catholic father and gratitude to the British soldiers who have saved the family's horse...[more]
This Side of Brightness
(Picador, 2003)
At the turn of the century, Nathan Walker comes to New York City to take the most dangerous job in the country. A sandhog, he burrows beneath the East River, digging the tunnel that will carry trains from Brooklyn to Manhattan. In the bowels of the riverbed, the sandhogs—black, white, Irish, Italian—dig together, the darkness erasing all differences...[more]
Songdogs
(Picador, 1996)
With unreliable memories and scraps of photographs as his only clues, Conor Lyons follows in the tracks of his father, a rootless photographer, as he moved from war-torn Spain, to the barren plains of Mexico, where he met and married Conor's mother, to the American West, and finally back to Ireland, where the marriage and the story reach their heartrending climax...[more]
Fishing the Sloe-Black River
Stories
(Picador, 2004)
The short fiction of Colum McCann documents a dizzying cast of characters in exile, loss, love, and displacement. There is the worn boxing champion who steals clothes from a New Orleans laundromat, the rumored survivor of Hiroshima who emigrates to the tranquil coast of Western Ireland, the Irishwoman who journeys through America in search of silence and solitude...[more]
The World Unfurled
(Chronicle Books, 2008)
Famed artist and illustrator Matteo Pericoli has created a massive mural in the American Airlines terminal of JFK airport in New York. Featuring a panorama of famous buildings from cities around the globe, the mural pays tribute to architectural genius of all stripes. Our distinctive accordion-fold-format book contains the mural in its entirety on a single 10-foot long sheet of paper. Accompanied with an essay by Colum McCann.