25 Books You Can't Put Down
Go on, take what you need. A perfect mystery, a mouthful of poetry...;O serves up a smorgasbord of the summer's best reads.
By Cathleen Medwick
Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann
368 pages; Random House
It's 1974, and a man is dancing on a tightrope between the towers of the World Trade Center—risky business, but as Colum McCann reveals in Let the Great World Spin (Random House), so is simply living day to day. This novel, with its web of disparate but connected characters—including a God-battered Irish monk, a swashbuckling prostitute, an artist with a guilty secret, a mother grieving her war dead—is an act of pure bravado, dizzying proof that to keep your balance you need to know how to fall.
First chapter: Read an excerpt from Let the Great World Spin
Reader's Guide: Get questions for discussion for your book club
It's 1974, and a man is dancing on a tightrope between the towers of the World Trade Center—risky business, but as Colum McCann reveals in Let the Great World Spin (Random House), so is simply living day to day. This novel, with its web of disparate but connected characters—including a God-battered Irish monk, a swashbuckling prostitute, an artist with a guilty secret, a mother grieving her war dead—is an act of pure bravado, dizzying proof that to keep your balance you need to know how to fall.
First chapter: Read an excerpt from Let the Great World Spin
Reader's Guide: Get questions for discussion for your book club
From the July 2009 issue of O, The Oprah Magazine