Everything in This Country Must - by Colum McCann (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

An early collection by the National Book Award-winning author of Let the Great World Spin and Apeirogon

This devastating early collection from Colum McCann finds the National Book Award-winning author of Let the Great World Spin already exploring one of his most enduring themes: the reverberations of political violence in individual lives.

The setting is McCann's native Ireland in the time of the Troubles, a conflict that manifests both brutally and subtly in everyday life. In the title story, a teenage girl struggles to reconcile her gratitude to the British soldiers who saved the family's horse with her Catholic upbringing. "Wood," which first appeared in The New Yorker, depicts a boy attempting to help the Protestants under the nose of his blind, disapproving father. And in solidarity with his uncle, an imprisoned confederate of Bobby Sands, the teenage narrator of "Hunger Strike" mounts a resistance of his own.

Each story displays McCann's unique ability to capture the costs, emotional and psychological as well as physical, of violence, and reminds readers why he's been lauded as "one of the most compassionate writers alive" (Air Mail).

Review Quotes

"When you read Colum McCann's [Everything in This Country Must, ] you'll know what it is to hear a symphony without instruments."
--The Washington Post

"[McCann] shows off all his talents here. . . .[Will] keep readers amazed and near tears."
--Publishers Weekly

"These are powerful stories--gritty, memorable and ambitious. The novella goes straight to the heart, both in terms of its theme and its emotional punch."
--Edna O'Brien

"There is no denying the discipline that has gone into Everything in This Country Must."
--The New York Times Book Review

"Captures that peculiar nexus of hormones, deprivation and political imperative on a Northern Irish child coming of age."
--Los Angeles Times Book Review

"[S]tunning. . . .Told in McCann's lush prose, these stories are both mesmerizing and painful."
--Minneapolis Star-Tribune

"McCann has the knack of capturing the intensity of these strongly held views in a low-key prose that underscores their vitriol, and in a way that disturbs the reader's sensibilities."
--Richmond Times-Dispatch

"[McCann] packs more passion and heartbreak into these two stories and novella. . . .than most writers can generate in books three times the length."
--Kirkus

"Beautifully, poetically written. . .the need to read them over and over again can't be denied."
--Booklist

"Further evidence of McCann's remarkable gifts as a prose artist as well as storyteller. . . .In each of these pieces, the miracle is how McCann, with prose so terse and spare, is able to create worlds so emotionally complex and moving."
--Library Journal

"Few contemporary writers are better at extracting the sublime from the base."
--The Guardian

"Colum McCann's stories are brooding, meditative and lyrically controlled to that delicate point where the emotion within them intensifies with each succeeding reading and recognition. The political turmoil of Northern Ireland finds here an answering, subtly respondent voice--wonderfully skilled and deeply felt."
--Seamus Deane, author of Reading in the Dark

"Excellent--this is a powerful and moving collection."
--Roddy Doyle, author of Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha

About the Author

Colum McCann is the author of seven novels, three collections of stories, and two works of nonfiction. Born and raised in Dublin, Ireland, he has been the recipient of many awards, including the National Book Award, the International Dublin Literary Prize, a Chevalier des Arts et Lettres, the 2010 Best Foreign Novel Award in China, and an Oscar nomination. He has been published in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Paris Review, The Guardian, and Granta, among others, and is a member of both the Irish arts academy and the American Academy of Arts. His work has been translated into over 40 languages.