Introduction

From the National Book Award–winning and bestselling author of Let the Great World Spin comes an epic novel rooted in the real-life friendship between two men united by loss.

“Staggering . . . Writing at the top of his game, Colum McCann brings us a book that we sorely need.”—Elizabeth Strout

Colum McCann’s most ambitious work to date, Apeirogon—named for a shape with a countably infinite number of sides—is a tour de force concerning friendship, love, loss, and belonging.

Bassam Aramin is Palestinian. Rami Elhanan is Israeli. They inhabit a world of conflict that colors every aspect of their daily lives, from the roads they are allowed to drive on, to the schools their daughters, Abir and Smadar, each attend, to the checkpoints, both physical and emotional, they must negotiate.

Their worlds shift irreparably after ten-year-old Abir is killed by a rubber bullet and thirteen-year-old Smadar becomes the victim of suicide bombers. When Bassam and Rami learn of each other’s stories, they recognize the loss that connects them and they attempt to use their grief as a weapon for peace.

McCann crafts Apeirogon out of a universe of fictional and nonfictional material. He crosses centuries and continents, stitching together time, art, history, nature, and politics in a tale both heartbreaking and hopeful. Musical, cinematic, muscular, delicate, and soaring, Apeirogon is a novel for our time.

Editorial Review

An Amazon Best Book of February 2020: Colum McCann’s 2009 novel, Let the Great World Spin, was a kaleidoscopic tale of New Yorkers in the 1970s that became an instant bestseller, won a National Book Award, and was named an Amazon Best Book of the Year, among many other honors. Ten years later, he has pushed the limits of kaleidoscopic with Apeirogon. The definition of the title is a shape with a countably infinite number of sides, and the book lives up to its meaning. In Apeirogon, McCann unfurls the story of two fathers, one Palestinian and one Israeli, who have both lost their daughters to the violence that surrounds them. Over the course of the day, these two men’s lives intertwine as they attempt to use their grief as a weapon for peace. Told in one thousand and one short vignettes, McCann flashes from the present to the past, sharing the lives of these men, the lives of their daughters, the experience of crossing police checkpoints and surviving jail, meditations on the migration pattern of birds, the making of bullets, and the history of the region. With these bursts, the novel centers on the unlikely friendship of two fathers and takes on a cinematic quality that vibrates with empathy, presenting a sweeping portrait of the complex conflict at the heart of the Holy Land. Apeirogon is a soaring and revelatory reading experience that is at once intimate and vast, heartbreaking and hopeful, and, yes, kaleidoscopic. —Al Woodworth, Amazon Book Review

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