Random House
October 2015
On Sale: October 13, 2015
256 pages ISBN: 0812996720 EAN: 9780812996722 Kindle: B00TNDOYGQ Hardcover / e-Book Add to Wish List
In such acclaimed novels as Let the Great World Spin
and TransAtlantic, National Book Award–winning author
Colum McCann has transfixed readers with his precision,
tenderness, and authority. Now, in his first collection of
short fiction in more than a decade, McCann charts the
territory of chance, and the profound and intimate
consequences of even our smallest moments.
“As it was, it was like being set down in the best of
poems, carried into a cold landscape, blindfolded, turned
around, unblindfolded, forced, then, to invent new ways of
seeing.”
In the exuberant title
novella, a retired judge reflects on his life’s work,
unaware as he goes about his daily routines that this
particular morning will be his last. In “Sh’khol,” a mother
spending Christmas alone with her son confronts the
unthinkable when he disappears while swimming off the coast
near their home in Ireland. In “Treaty,” an elderly nun
catches a snippet of a news report in which it is revealed
that the man who once kidnapped and brutalized her is alive,
masquerading as an agent of peace. And in “What Time Is It
Now, Where You Are?” a writer constructs a story about a
Marine in Afghanistan calling home on New Year’s Eve.
Deeply personal, subtly subversive, at times
harrowing, and indeed funny, yet also full of comfort,
Thirteen Ways of Looking is a striking achievement.
With unsurpassed empathy for his characters and their inner
lives, Colum McCann forges from their stories a profound
tribute to our search for meaning and grace. The collection
is a rumination on the power of storytelling in a world
where language and memory can sometimes falter, but in the
end do not fail us, and a contemplation of the healing power
of literature.
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