TransAtlantic

TransAtlantic by Colum McCann moves between three historical crossings of the Atlantic and one family line that links them. In Newfoundland in 1919, aviators Jack Alcock and Arthur Brown set out for Ireland in a modified bomber, attempting the first nonstop transatlantic flight and hoping it might help heal the wounds of the Great War. In Dublin in 1845 and 1846, Frederick Douglass is on an international lecture tour promoting his autobiography. He finds the Irish sympathetic to the abolitionist cause, even as famine devastates the countryside and the poor endure hardships that shock even a man who has been enslaved in America. In New York in 1998, Senator George Mitchell, son of an Irish-American father and a Lebanese mother, leaves behind a young wife and newborn child to travel to Belfast. There he must guide the bitter and volatile Northern Ireland peace talks toward an uncertain conclusion. A series of remarkable women connect these episodes. The story begins with Lily Duggan, an Irish housemaid whose path crosses Douglass's, and follows her daughter Emily and granddaughter Lottie. It reaches the present day with Hannah Carson, in whom the hopes and failures of earlier generations live on. Their journeys take them from the loughs of Ireland to the flatlands of Missouri and the windswept coast of Newfoundland, and each finds that small moments of grace can ripple through time, space and memory. McCann is an Irish-born novelist who lives in New York. The novel reflects on identity and history in a world that seems to grow smaller with each passing year.