It explores the lives of some real, some imagined, characters who bridge Ireland and the US, reaching from 1845 to 2012. Symbolically, it opens in 1919 with Jack Alcock and Teddy Brown making the first Trans
It explores the lives of some real, some imagined, characters who bridge Ireland and the US, reaching from 1845 to 2012. Symbolically, it opens in 1919 with Jack Alcock and Teddy Brown making the first Transatlantic flight in a modified First World War bomber.
The other real-life subjects are the 19th-century abolitionist and former slave Frederick Douglass, touring Ireland to drum up support for his cause, and Senator George Mitchell, an integral cog in the 1998 Northern Ireland peace process (even Tony Blair has a small cameo; McCann thanks him in the credits for help in understanding the negotiations).
However, at the heart of the novel are four generations of doughty fictional women, their emotional lives laid out more fully than those of McCann's real-life characters. Lily Duggan, a maid in the house of Douglass's publisher Richard Webb, was inspired by Douglass to start a new life across the Atlantic.
She was a survivor, her life punctuated with great tragedy. Finding short-lived happiness with a man who makes a living from preserving, and selling ice, her chapter is among the most powerful in the book. A recurrent character is her daughter Emily, a celebrated journalist; Emily's own daughter Lottie became her globetrotting photographer sidekick (their story overlapping with Alcock and Brown's after the women report on the ground-breaking flight). Lottie eventually settled in Belfast and, at the end of the family line lies her eccentric daughter Hannah whose son became a tragic victim of the Troubles.
At the heart of the novel are four generations of doughty fictional women, their emotional lives laid out more fully than those of McCann's r