by Colum McCann
LONGLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE
SHORTLISTED FOR THE DUBLIN LITERARY AWARD
SHORTLISTED FOR THE PRIX FEMINA AND THE PRIX MEDICIS
SHORTLISTED FOR THE GOLDSBORO BOOKS GLASS BELL AWARD
WINNER OF THE PRIX DU MEILLEUR LIVRES ETRANGER
WINNER OF THE 2020 NATIONAL JEWISH BOOK AWARDS
CHOSEN AS A BOOK OF 2020 BY THE SUNDAY TIMES, OBSERVER, GUARDIAN, i PAPER, FINANCIAL TIMES, NEW STATESMAN, SCOTSMAN, IRISH TIMES, BBC.COM, WATERSTONES.COM
'A wondrous book. It left me hopeful; this is its gift' Elizabeth Strout
'An empathy engine ... It is, itself, an agent of change' New York Times Book Review
'A quite extraordinary novel' Kamila Shamsie
______________________
How do we continue living once we have lost our reason to live?
Rami and Bassam live in the city of Jerusalem – but exist worlds apart, divided by an age-old conflict. And yet they have one thing in common. Both are fathers; both are fathers of daughters – and both daughters are now lost.
When Rami and Bassam meet, and tell one another the story of their grief, the most unexpected thing of all happens: they become best of friends. And their stories become one story, a story with the power to heal – and the power to change the world.
______________________
'The book goes anywhere and everywhere. It is a delirious and thrilling improvisation, a jazz solo spun out of that meeting ... A spectacular structure of stories about everything' Bryan Appleyard, Sunday Times
LONGLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE
SHORTLISTED FOR THE DUBLIN LITERARY AWARD
SHORTLISTED FOR THE PRIX FEMINA AND THE PRIX MEDICIS
SHORTLISTED FOR THE GOLDSBORO BOOKS GLASS BELL AWARD
WINNER OF THE PRIX DU MEILLEUR LIVRES ETRANGER
WINNER OF THE 2020 NATIONAL JEWISH BOOK AWARDS
CHOSEN AS A BOOK OF 2020 BY THE SUNDAY TIMES, OBSERVER, GUARDIAN, i PAPER, FINANCIAL TIMES, NEW STATESMAN, SCOTSMAN, IRISH TIMES, BBC.COM, WATERSTONES.COM
'A wondrous book. It left me hopeful; this is its gift' Elizabeth Strout
'An empathy engine ... It is, itself, an agent of change' New York Times Book Review
'A quite extraordinary novel' Kamila Shamsie
______________________
How do we continue living once we have lost our reason to live?
Rami and Bassam live in the city of Jerusalem – but exist worlds apart, divided by an age-old conflict. And yet they have one thing in common. Both are fathers; both are fathers of daughters – and both daughters are now lost.
When Rami and Bassam meet, and tell one another the story of their grief, the most unexpected thing of all happens: they become best of friends. And their stories become one story, a story with the power to heal – and the power to change the world.
______________________
'The book goes anywhere and everywhere. It is a delirious and thrilling improvisation, a jazz solo spun out of that meeting ... A spectacular structure of stories about everything' Bryan Appleyard, Sunday Times
Reviews-
-
Starred review from December 2, 2019
National Book Award–winner McCann (Let the Great World Spin) bases this masterful novel on the lives of two real men working together toward Middle Eastern peace. Rami Elhanan, 67 on the single day of 2016 on which the main narrative takes place, is a graphic designer and Israeli military veteran. In September 1997, his 13-year-old daughter, Smadar, was killed in a Jerusalem suicide bombing. His need for revenge fades when he joins the Parents’ Circle, whose members, of many nationalities and religions, have all lost a child in the Israel/Palestine conflict. Nineteen years younger than Elhanan, Palestinian Bassam Aramin is jailed in 1985, at 17, for resisting the Israeli occupiers in Hebron, where he’s raised. During his imprisonment, writings by Gandhi, among others, and friendship with one of the Israeli guards convince him of the power of nonviolence. Released after seven years, he helps found Combatants for Peace, which brings Palestinian and Israeli fighters—among them Elhanan’s son, who introduces the two men—together for dialogue. The fatal 2005 shooting of Bassam’s 10-year-old daughter, Abir, by an Israeli border guard doesn’t shake his belief that Israelis and Palestinians share “an equity of pain”; he and Elhanan begin meeting daily, using their daughters’ stories to become international advocates for peace. The book’s title is a reference to a polygon with a countable but infinite number of sides, and McCann evokes the experience of its protagonists and their region through 1,001 brief numbered segments that incorporate sequences in the men’s own voices and interconnect topics including bullet manufacturing, Jorge Luis Borges, and birds. Balancing its dazzling intellectual breadth with moments of searing intimacy, this is a transformative vision of a historic conflict and a triumph of the novelist’s art. Agent: Sarah Chalfant, Wylie Agency. - independent.co.uk Colum McCann's transcendent book is full of hundreds of thought-provoking, emotional segments ... McCann turns these haunting true stories into engrossing fiction, and he does so with poetic power
- New York Times Book Review Apeirogon is an empathy engine, utterly collapsing the gulf between teller and listener ... It achieves its aim by merging acts of imagination and extrapolation with historical fact. But it's undisputably a novel, and, to my mind, an exceedingly important one. It does far more than make an argument for peace; it is, itself, an agent of change
- Sunday Times Now you have to read Apeirogon ... Delirious and thrilling, spectacular
- Times Literary Supplement A jagged, fractured, teeming novel ... Apeirogon is a daring structural feat, a conspicuously elaborate and multivalent piece of novelistic engineering ... The distilled and fractured form has a glistening poetry
- Washington Post A loving, thoughtful, grueling novel
- Sunday Times, Books of 2020 Powerful novel about the shared grief of a Palestinian and Israeli
- New Statesman The tale of a friendship between an Israeli and a Palestinian ... Composed of 1,001 chapters, it has won effusive praise from early readers
- Financial Times, 2020 visions: the year ahead in books Colum McCann seems to shape-shift with each new book; Apeirogon examines the friendship between Israeli and Palestinian fathers who have each lost children to the conflict
- Irish Examiner, 20 Books for 2020 The advance word on this novel suggests a level of ambition we may not have encountered yet from the Dublin native. It explores the Palestine-Israel conflict through the unlikely friendship of two men from either side
- i, Books of 2020 McCann's epic involving novel follows the slow-blooming friendship between two men, an Israeli and Palestinian, linked by the loss of their daughters
- TIME Magazine The latest novel from the National Book Award winner blends fiction with history to examine how two men channel their grief into political power as they become advocates for peace in the Middle East
