Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann

'I knew what it was like to come to a divided place.' 'I knew what a checkpoint was about,' he added. 'I was always interested in the dynamics of a country at war with itself. 'You go up on a bus and the soldiers would come on at the border,' he said. He remembers riding the bus north with her to visit the family's farm. McCann grew up in Dublin in the shadow of the Troubles. The link between McCann's background and his decision to focus on personal and political divisions may stem from his childhood. 'It struck me that maybe I was the right one to tell it because I didn't know the politics. 'I tried to get to know the region,' he said. The author travelled to the Middle East researching his book a dozen times, straddling the back of Rami's motorcycle and staying at the homes of the men. 'Bassam and Rami were telling these stories to keep (their daughters) alive,' he said,

Unable to shake the experience, when McCann returned home he asked the men if he could write their stories. They wrote on a napkin, 'Harness the power of your grief.' I still have it.' 'My breath was taken away by the depth of their stories,' he continued. 'In one of the offices sat two men,' he said in a telephone interview from New York. McCann climbed a staircase into an Israeli office building on a rainy November afternoon in 2015. McCann met the pair when he was visiting the Middle East with his nonprofit story exchange group Narrative 4. The author focuses on the relationship between their fathers, Bassam Aramin, a Palestinian Muslim, and Rami Elhanan, an Israeli Jew. McCann fractured his book into 1,001 chapters, echoing the storytelling of Scheherazade in 'One Thousand and One Nights.' The structure reflects the infinite complications underlying the girls' deaths and the resulting unending grief. This pair of tragedies provides the nucleus of McCann's 'Apeirogon.' An apeirogon is a polygon with an infinite yet countable number of sides. A decade later, 10-year-old Abir Aramin, donned in her school uniform and holding a candy bracelet she had just bought, was shot in the back of the head by an 18-year-old Israeli soldier. In 1997, 13-year-old Smadar Elhanan,wearing a Blondie T-shirt and listening to Sinead O'Connor's 'Nothing Compares 2 U' on her Walkman, was walking down a Jerusalem street when three young Palestinian men detonated suicide belts, killing themselves, Smadar and four others. His work has been published in 40 languages. Born and raised in Dublin, McCann is the author of seven novels, including 'Let the Great World Spin,' 'TransAtlantic,' 'Zoli' and 'Dancer,' as well as three story collections and two works of nonfiction.

Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann