
Let the Great World Spin
A Novel
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Narrated by:
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Richard Poe
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Gerard Doyle
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Carol Monda
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Johanna Parker
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Ramon De Ocampo
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By:
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Colum McCann
About this listen
NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER • Colum McCann’s beloved novel inspired by Philippe Petit’s daring high-wire stunt, which is also depicted in the film The Walk starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt
In the dawning light of a late-summer morning, the people of lower Manhattan stand hushed, staring up in disbelief at the Twin Towers. It is August 1974, and a mysterious tightrope walker is running, dancing, leaping between the towers, suspended a quarter mile above the ground. In the streets below, a slew of ordinary lives become extraordinary in bestselling novelist Colum McCann’s stunningly intricate portrait of a city and its people.
Let the Great World Spin is the critically acclaimed author’s most ambitious novel yet: a dazzlingly rich vision of the pain, loveliness, mystery, and promise of New York City in the 1970s.
Corrigan, a radical young Irish monk, struggles with his own demons as he lives among the prostitutes in the middle of the burning Bronx. A group of mothers gather in a Park Avenue apartment to mourn their sons who died in Vietnam, only to discover just how much divides them even in grief. A young artist finds herself at the scene of a hit-and-run that sends her own life careening sideways. Tillie, a thirty-eight-year-old grandmother, turns tricks alongside her teenage daughter, determined not only to take care of her family but to prove her own worth. Elegantly weaving together these and other seemingly disparate lives, McCann’s powerful allegory comes alive in the unforgettable voices of the city’s people, unexpectedly drawn together by hope, beauty, and the “artistic crime of the century.”
A sweeping and radical social novel, Let the Great World Spin captures the spirit of America in a time of transition, extraordinary promise, and, in hindsight, heartbreaking innocence. Hailed as a “fiercely original talent” (San Francisco Chronicle), award-winning novelist McCann has delivered a triumphantly American masterpiece that awakens in us a sense of what the novel can achieve, confront, and even heal.
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Critic reviews
“This is a gorgeous book, multilayered and deeply felt, and it’s a damned lot of fun to read, too. Leave it to an Irishman to write one of the greatest-ever novels about New York. There’s so much passion and humor and pure lifeforce on every page of Let the Great World Spin that you’ll find yourself giddy, dizzy, overwhelmed.”—Dave Eggers
“In his own gritty and lyrical voice, Colum McCann has lifted up a handful of souls to the light in this big-hearted, adroit and probing novel, and brought forth a spectrum of the painful, the beautiful and the unexpected.”—Amy Bloom
“Every character grabs you by the throat and makes you care. McCann’s dazzling polyphony walks the high wire and succeeds triumphantly.”—Emma Donoghue, author of Room
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American Mother
- By: Colum McCann, Diane Foley
- Narrated by: Jamie Lee Curtis, Colum McCann
- Length: 7 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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In late 2021, Diane Foley sat at a table across from her son's killer, Alexanda Kotey, a member of the ISIS group known as "The Beatles" who plead guilty to the kidnapping, torture, and murder of her son seven years before. Kotey was about to go serve life imprisonment and this was Diane’s chance to talk to the man who had been involved with brutally taking her son's last breath. What would she say to his killer? What would he reveal to her? Might she even be able to summon forgiveness for him? So begins American Mother.
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Such a sad story
- By Joan Henderson on 11-20-24
By: Colum McCann, and others
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This Side of Brightness
- A Novel
- By: Colum McCann
- Narrated by: Dion Graham
- Length: 8 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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In the early years of the century, Nathan Walker leaves his native Georgia for New York City and the most dangerous job in America. A sandhog, he burrows beneath the East River, digging the tunnel that will carry trains from Brooklyn to Manhattan. Above ground, the sandhogs - black, white, Irish, Italian - keep their distance from each other until a spectacular accident welds a bond between Walker and his fellow diggers--a bond that will bless and curse the next three generations.
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Disappointing
- By Tom on 06-14-21
By: Colum McCann
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Zoli
- A Novel
- By: Colum McCann
- Narrated by: Kathleen Gati, Colum McCann
- Length: 10 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
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Zoli Novotna, a young woman raised in the traveling Gypsy tradition, is a poet by accident as much as desire. As 1930s fascism spreads over Czechoslovakia, Zoli and her grandfather flee to join a clan of fellow Romani harpists. Sharpened by the world of books, which is often frowned upon in the Romani tradition, Zoli becomes the poster girl for a brave new world. As she shapes the ancient songs to her times, she finds her gift embraced by the Gypsy people and savored by a young English expatriate, Stephen Swann.
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ENGROSSING!
- By Prof. Julie de Sherbinin on 11-03-20
By: Colum McCann
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Dancer
- A Novel
- By: Colum McCann
- Narrated by: Dion Graham
- Length: 10 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
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Taking his inspiration from biographical facts, novelist Colum McCann tells the erotically charged story of the Russian dancer Rudolf Nureyev through the cast of those who knew him. Spanning four decades and many worlds, from the horrors of the Second World War to the wild abandon of New York in the '80s, Dancer is peopled by a large cast of characters, obscure and famous: doormen and shoemakers, nurses and translators, Margot Fonteyn, Eric Bruhn, and John Lennon.
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A genius Dancer, but unlikable and uninteresting
- By Reader X on 05-28-25
By: Colum McCann
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The Taking of Getty Oil
- The Full Story of the Most Spectacular - and Catastrophic - Takeover of All
- By: Steve Coll
- Narrated by: Steven Cooper
- Length: 17 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
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A true story of family, ambition, and greed in the most bitter and controversial takeover struggle in business history. The high-stakes fight between Texaco and Pennzoil to take over Getty Oil is a startling and intriguing case involving family infighting, courtroom drama, and corporate intrigue that ends in bankruptcy and the largest damages award in American history.
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Sibling contention, intrique, courtroom drama
- By Jean on 08-27-15
By: Steve Coll
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Songdogs
- A Novel
- By: Colum McCann
- Narrated by: Dion Graham
- Length: 6 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
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With unreliable memories and scraps of photographs as his only clues, Conor Lyons follows in the tracks of his father, a rootless photographer, as he moved from war-torn Spain, to the barren plains of Mexico, where he met and married Conor's mother, to the American West, and finally back to Ireland, where the marriage and the story reach their heartrending climax. The narratives of Conor's quest and his parents' lives twine and untwine to astonishing effect.
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A voyage into the River of Memory and the Eternal Quest for Truth.
- By Tom on 06-16-23
By: Colum McCann
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Anatomy of a Murder
- By: Robert Traver
- Narrated by: Jason Culp
- Length: 19 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
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First published by St. Martin's in 1958, Robert Traver's Anatomy of a Murder immediately became the number one best seller in America, and was subsequently turned into the successful and now classic Otto Preminger film. It is is not only the most popular courtroom drama in American fiction, but one of the most popular novels of our time. A gripping tale of deceit, murder, and a sensational trial, Anatomy of a Murder is unmatched in the authenticity of its settings, events, and characters.
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Great story
- By peter on 10-05-20
By: Robert Traver
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The Great Fire
- A Novel
- By: Shirley Hazzard
- Narrated by: Virginia Leishman
- Length: 11 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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This mesmerizing, poetic novel won the 2003 National Book Award for fiction and has earned universal acclaim. Set against the beautiful but tragic landscape of post-World War II Asia, The Great Fire tells a sweeping tale of the search for new beginnings in a world ravaged by tragedy.
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Always found something else to do
- By Margarita on 02-11-04
By: Shirley Hazzard
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Everything in This Country Must
- A Novella and Two Stories
- By: Colum McCann
- Narrated by: Colum McCann
- Length: 3 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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Colum McCann, a writer of fierce originality and haunting lyricism, turns to the troubles in Northern Ireland and reveals the reverberations of political tragedy in the most intimate lives of men and women, parents and children.
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animal abuse
- By B. E. Jackson on 05-18-25
By: Colum McCann
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Fishing the Sloe-Black River
- Stories
- By: Colum McCann
- Narrated by: Colum McCann
- Length: 5 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
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The short fiction of Colum McCann documents a dizzying cast of characters in exile, loss, love, and displacement. There is the worn boxing champion who steals clothes from a New Orleans laundromat, the rumored survivor of Hiroshima who emigrates to the tranquil coast of Western Ireland, the Irishwoman who journeys through America in search of silence and solitude. But what is found in these stories, and discovered by these characters, is the astonishing poetry and peace found in the mundane: a memory, a scent on the wind, the grace in the curve of a street.
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Another chance to enjoy McCann’s reading his verses.
- By Tom on 11-17-23
By: Colum McCann
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Bleak House
- By: Charles Dickens
- Narrated by: Simon Vance
- Length: 32 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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First published in monthly parts from March 1852 to September 1853, this novel follows the fortunes of three pedestrian characters; Esther Summerson, Ada Clare, and Richard Carstone. The story they tell embondies Dickens' merciless indictment of the Court of Chancery and its bungling, morally corrupt handling of the endless case of Jarndyce v. Jarndyce, giving the novel its scope and meaning.
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30 hours was too short for me
- By UU Ma on 01-08-03
By: Charles Dickens
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The Orphan Master's Son
- A Novel
- By: Adam Johnson
- Narrated by: Tim Kang, Josiah D. Lee, James Kyson Lee, and others
- Length: 19 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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Pak Jun Do is the haunted son of a lost mother - a singer “stolen” to Pyongyang - and an influential father who runs Long Tomorrows, a work camp for orphans. There the boy is given his first taste of power, picking which orphans eat first and which will be lent out for manual labor. Recognized for his loyalty and keen instincts, Jun Do comes to the attention of superiors in the state, rises in the ranks, and starts on a road from which there will be no return.
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The most compelling listen I've ever owned
- By Lisa on 01-27-12
By: Adam Johnson
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Girl, Woman, Other
- By: Bernardine Evaristo
- Narrated by: Anna-Maria Nabirye
- Length: 11 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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From one of Britain's most celebrated writers of color, Girl, Woman, Other is a magnificent portrayal of the intersections of identity and a moving and hopeful story of an interconnected group of black British women. Winner of the 2019 Booker Prize and short-listed for the Gordon Burn Prize, Girl, Woman, Other paints a vivid portrait of the state of post-Brexit Britain, as well as looking back to the legacy of Britain's colonial history in Africa and the Caribbean.
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smart, compassionate, confronting and enjoyable
- By Kelly on 12-20-19
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Tree of Smoke
- A Novel
- By: Denis Johnson
- Narrated by: Will Patton
- Length: 23 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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This is the story of Skip Sands—spy-in-training, engaged in Psychological Operations against the Vietcong—and the disasters that befall him thanks to his famous uncle, a war hero known in intelligence circles simply as the Colonel. This is also the story of the Houston brothers, Bill and James, young men who drift out of the Arizona desert into a war in which the line between disinformation and delusion has blurred away. In its vision of human folly, and its gritty, sympathetic portraits of men and women desperate for an end to their loneliness.
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tree of smoke
- By ed spilka on 12-13-07
By: Denis Johnson
it deserved The Pulitzer as we as the other awards it received that year.
A Masterpiece read by master story tellers...
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This what a great novel feels like
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Expected better I guess
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It's a lovely story, though, with a diverse array of characters--some I would have like to have heard less from, some I wanted to know more about. It's beautifully written and captures a New York that I remember seeing, mostly out of my peripheral vision, when I was growing up along the city's edge.
I'd recommend the book, but not the audiobook. I found myself regretting choosing Audible for this one; I think this is just one that was meant to be read.
Wish I'd chosen the book, rather than audio.
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wonderful book
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a wide ranging story of lfe
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Lushly written, intriguingly interwoven stories
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What did you love best about Let the Great World Spin?
The structure of the storytelling.What did you like best about this story?
The multi-dimensionality of the story, constructed as it is, makes the whole greater than the sum of its individually-compelling parts.Have you listened to any of the narrators’s other performances before? How does this one compare?
I have not.Was there a moment in the book that particularly moved you?
The younger brother's unswerving compassion, throughout.Any additional comments?
One of the few books that is better in audio form -- though I suspect it would be fantastic in print as well.Beautiful Narration of a Great Story
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great story
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Engaging!
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