Colum McCann

Tells the story of a group of tunnel diggers in New York and how a spectacular accident underground changes their lives and affects the next three generations.

Colum McCann's Everything in This Country Must, a writer of fierce originality and haunting lyricism, 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. The young hero of Hunger Strike, a novella, tries to replicate the experience of his uncle, an IRA prisoner on hunger strike. And in Wood, a small boy does his part for the Protestant marches, concealing his involvement from his blind father. Writing in a new form, but with the skill and force and sparkling poetry that have brought him international acclaim, Colum McCann has delivered masterful, memorable short fiction.

Als Anfang des 20. Jahrhunderts der erste Tunnel unter dem East River entsteht, der Brooklyn mit Manhattan verbindet, ahnt niemand, dass viele Jahrzehnte später Menschen in dem unterirdischen Labyrinth leben werden. ? Selten hat es ein junger Autor auf so überzeugende Weise verstanden, Historie und Fiktion zu einer ganz eigenen Welt zu verschmelzen.? (Focus)

Colum McCann creates in Songdogs a mesmerizing evocation of the gulf between memory and imagination, love and loss, past and present. 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. The narratives of Conor's quest and his parents' lives twine and untwine to astonishing effect.