Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann

Colum McCann's Let the Great World Spin is a novel written as a series of wonderfully crafted and subtly linked stories. The common denominator running throughout the book is the true story of French acrobat Philippe Petit who walked a tightrope between the World Trade Center's Twin Towers in August 1974, not long after it was built.

The stories, though, are not about the acrobat but about the ordinary but extraordinary people 110 stories below, the people whose lives intersect whether through wars, telephone lines, wrecks, charity or simply family. These people are drug-addicted hookers, a Bronx mother who grieves her son who died in Vietnam, a Park Avenue woman who mourns her son who also didn't come home from the war. There is a wealthy judge hearing a series of routine criminal cases until he gets the acrobat's. And there are two very different Irish brothers. One devotes his life to helping prostitutes while the other tends a bar and cannot comprehend his brother's seemingly misguided charity.

McCann takes the reader back to a time when computers were in their infancy, before Richard Nixon had resigned, when the nation was as divided perhaps even more than today. He gives us a realistic glimpse of New York in the 1970s, from Park Avenue to the Bronx. And in so doing, he gives us a truly great work of literature.