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 Awardβwinning 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.
βAs 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.β
In the exuberant title novella, a retired judge reflects on his lifeβs work, unaware as he goes about his daily routines that this particular morning will be his last. In βShβkhol,β 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 βTreaty,β 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 βWhat Time Is It Now, Where You Are?β a writer constructs a story about a Marine in Afghanistan calling home on New Yearβs 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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