TransAtlantic

In 1919, two British veterans pilot a Vickers Vimy from Newfoundland to Ireland, becoming the first men to fly across the Atlantic, taking “the war out of the plane.” In 1845, escaped American slave Frederick Douglass comes to Ireland at the start of the famine on a speaking tour, staying with Irish Quakers and inspiring their maid to seek her future in America. In 1998, decades into the Troubles, American Senator George Mitchell brokers the Good Friday Peace Accords. Darting in, past, and through these stories are generations of women, including the maid’s descendants, Irish, American, Canadian, with sons lost to the civil wars of both continents. This is what interests McCann: lives made amid and despite violence; the hidden braids of places, times, and people; the way the old days “arrive back in the oddest ways, suddenly taut, breaking the surface.” A beautiful writer, if overly partial to three-word phrases (“Kites of language. Clouds of logic”) that can start to call attention to themselves, McCann won the National Book Award for Let the Great World Spin, which also linked disparate stories. This time though, while each story is interesting, the threads between them—especially in the last section, which features the maid’s great-granddaughter—aren’t pulled taut enough by shared meaning. Agent: Sarah Chalfant, the Wylie Agency. (June)