The English language has no specific word for the parent that has lost a child. There exist words for orphan, widow and widower, but there is no word that captures and conveys this tragic type of loss.

It has been eleven years since Diane Foley's son, the American journalist James Foley, was kidnapped in northern Syria, and nearly ten since that day in August 2014 when she would learn that he had been murdered by ISIS in a public beheading that would ricochet in video around the world. A whole decade. Time rushes past. And yet, for Diane, that moment is unending.

In American Mother, legendary author Colum McCann tells Diane's story as she recalls the months of his captivity, the efforts made to bring him home and the days following his death, in which Diane came face to face with one of the men responsible for her son's kidnapping and torture. A testament to the power of radical empathy and moral courage, American Mother takes us inside one woman's extraordinary journey to find connection in a world torn asunder, and to fight for others as a way to keep her son's memory alive.

How do we continue living once we have lost our reason to live?

Rami and Bassam live in the city of Jerusalem - but exist worlds apart, divided by an age-old conflict. And yet they have one thing in common. Both are fathers; both are fathers of daughters - and both daughters are now lost.

When Rami and Bassam meet, and tell one another the story of their grief, the most unexpected thing of all happens: they become best of friends. And their stories become one story, a story with the power to heal - and the power to change the world.

Fictionalized account of the events which lead to the 1996 murder of journalist Veronica Guerin. Sinead Hamilton (Joan Allen) is a reporter employed by the Irish Sunday Globe. In the course of her work she becomes interested in the possibility of exposing the corruption which allows Dublin's drug lords to lead the lives of respectable businessmen, and of working towards a reform of Ireland's notoriously ineffective criminal laws. But her investigations earn her some enemies in high places, and Sinead soon receives threats to her own well-being.

From the National Book Award-winning, Booker Prize-longlisted author of Let the Great World Spin and Transatlantic comes a passionate and practical book of advice, as essential for budding writers as Stephen King's On Writing 'A warm, open-hearted paean to the joys of writing' Sunday Times 'Excellent ... cannot fail as a pick-me-up' Observer I hope there is something here for any young writer - or any older writer, for that matter - who happens to be looking for a teacher to come along, a teacher who, in the end, can really teach nothing at all but fire. From the critically acclaimed Colum McCann, author of the National Book Award winner Let the Great World Spin, comes a paean to the power of language, and a direct address to the artistic, professional and philosophical concerns that challenge and sometimes torment an author. Comprising fifty-two short prose pieces, Letters to a Young Writer ranges from practical matters of authorship, such as finding an agent, the pros and cons of creative writing degrees and handling bad reviews, through to the more joyous and celebratory, as McCann elucidates the pleasures to be found in truthful writing, for: 'the best writing makes us glad that we are - however briefly - alive.' Emphatic and empathetic, pragmatic and profound, this is an essential companion to any author's journey - and a deeply personal work from one of our greatest literary voices.

It's New York, August 1974: a man is walking in the sky. Between the newly built Twin Towers, the man twirls through the air. Far below, the lives of complete strangers spin towards each other: Corrigan, a radical Irish monk working in the Bronx; Claire, a delicate Upper East Side housewife reeling from the death of her son; Lara, a drug-addled young artist; Gloria, solid and proud despite decades of hardship; Tillie, a hooker who used to dream of a better life; and Jazzlyn, her beautiful daughter raised on promises that reach beyond the skyline of New York. In the shadow of one reckless and beautiful act, these disparate lives will collide, and be transformed for ever.

'McCann returns to Ireland with this collection, turning his measured gaze and incisive prose to the country's recent history with devastating effect' Maggie O'Farrell 'McCann once again shows why he is one of the best writers in the world ... Deeply moving and powerfully written, these are likely to become classics' Big Issue ___________________ One powerful novella, with two thematically linked short stories on either side of it, forms the basis of Everything in This Country Must. Although these are stories about Ireland and the Troubles, they have an almost mythical rather than a political feel. In the title story, four young soldiers help a farmer and his daughter free their horse from a stream in flood, unable to understand that their help will never be anything but an insult. In the novella, Hunger Strike, a young boy and his mother flee to Galway as the boy's uncle succumbs to a hunger strike in a Derry gaol. In Wood, a ten-year-old boy is asked by his mother to make poles for the marching season. ___________________ '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

'A gifted and determined stylist, Colum McCann seems to have taken a vow never to write a dull line' New York Times Book Review 'Orwell would have been proud to journey with a writer as good as Colum McCann' Irish Sunday Independent ______________________ An ageing nun is tracked to ground by her sister; a garrulous beautician must lay out the corpse of a loved one. These are eloquent tales of exile and displacement, of characters always in search of a way back home or of a way to leave it. Mischievous, assured and versatile, Colum McCann's collection of short stories marks him out as one of our best contemporary writers.

This novel opens on a battlefield: trudging back from the front through a ravaged and icy wasteland, their horses dying around them, their own hunger rendering them almost savage, the Russian soldiers are exhausted as they reach the city of Ufa, desperate for food and shelter. They find both, and then music and dance. And there, spinning unafraid among them, dancing for the soldiers and anyone else who'll watch him, is one small pale boy, Rudolf. This is Colum McCann's dancer: Rudolf, a prodigy at six years old, who became the greatest dancer of the century, who redefined dance, rewrote his own life, and died of AIDS before anyone knew he had it. This is an extraordinary life transformed into extraordinary fiction by one of the most acclaimed writers of his generation. One kind of masculine grace is perfectly matched to another in Colum McCann's beautiful and daring new novel.

The life of Zoli Novotna begins on the leafy backroads of Slovakia, when she and her grandfather come upon a quiet lake where their family has been drowned by Fascist guards. Zoli and her grandfather flee to join up with another clan of travelling harpists. So begins an epic tale of song, intimacy and betrayal. Based loosely on the true story of the Gypsy poet Papusza, and set against the backdrop of the Second World War, Zoli is a love story, a tale of loss, and a parable of modern-day Europe.

SHORTLISTED FOR THE INTERNATIONAL IMPAC DUBLIN LITERARY AWARD 2015 LONGLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2013 SHORTLISTED FOR THE IRISH NOVEL OF THE YEAR 2013 'It is, simply, perfect' Irish Examiner 'Majestic' Sunday Times 'Quite simply one of the best, most sustained pieces of fiction I've read in some time' Independent ____________________ In 1919 Emily Ehrlich watches as two young airmen, Alcock and Brown, emerge from the carnage of World War One to pilot the very first non-stop transatlantic flight from Newfoundland to the west of Ireland. In 1845 Frederick Douglass, a black American slave, lands in Ireland to champion ideas of democracy and freedom, only to find a famine unfurling at his feet. And in 1998 Senator George Mitchell criss-crosses the ocean in search of an elusive Irish peace. Stitching these stories intricately together, Colum McCann sets out to explore the fine line between what is real and what is imagined, and the tangled skein of connections that make up our lives.

The debut novel from National Book Award winner and Booker nominee Colum McCann 'Colum McCann conjures a hugely inventive debut' Observer 'McCann writes equally well about Ireland, America and Mexico, and he links past and present in a finely woven narrative: Songdogs is a vivid, beautifully measured book' Sunday Times __________________ Colum McCann's first novel goes back to the years before the Spanish Civil War, following the adventures of a peripatetic Irish photographer from the war-strewn shores of Europe to the exotic plains of Mexico. The story is told in the words of the photographer's only son, a wanderer himself, who uses his father's unreliable memories and the fading remnants of his art to piece together his family history and explain the mystery surrounding his mother - a Mexican beauty brought back by his father to Ireland.

At the turn of the twentieth century, Nathan Walker comes to New York City to take the most dangerous job in the country: digging the tunnel far beneath the Hudson that will carry trains from Brooklyn to Manhattan. In the bowels of the riverbed, the workers - black, white, Irish and Italian - dig together, the darkness erasing all differences. But above ground, the men keep their distance until a dramatic accident on a bitter winter's day welds a bond between Walker and his fellow workers that will both bless and curse three generations. Almost ninety years later, Treefrog stumbles on the same tunnels and sets about creating a home amongst the drug addicts, alcoholics, prostitutes and petty criminals that comprise the forgotten homeless community.

Published to coincide the with 50th anniversary of the Israel occupation of the West Bank, an anthology that explores the human cost of the conflict there as witnessed by such notable writers as Colum McCann, Colm Toibin, Dave Eggers, Madeleine Thien, Eimear McBride, Taiye Selasi and editors Michael Chabon and Ayelet Waldman. June 2017 marks the 50th anniversary of the Israel occupation of the West Bank. The violence on both sides of the conflict has been horrific, the casualties catastrophic. Michael Chabon and Ayelet Waldman, two of today's most renowned novelists and essayists, have joined forces with the Israeli NGO Breaking the Silence-an organization comprised of former Israeli soldiers who served in the occupied territories and saw firsthand the injustice there-and a host of illustrious writers to tell the stories of the people on the ground in the contested territories. KINGDOM OF OLIVES AND ASH includes contributions from some of our most esteemed storytellers, including essays from editors Chabon and Waldman. Their writing enables readers to understand the human narratives behind the litany of grim destruction broadcasted nightly on the news. Together they all stand witness to the human cost of the occupation.

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. Fishing the Sloe-Black River is a work of pure augury, of the channeling and re-spoken lives of people exposed to the beauty of the everyday.

Fire and Forget includes the title story from Redeployment by Phil Klay, 2014 National Book Award Winner in FictionThese stories aren't pretty and they aren't for the faint of heart. They are realistic, haunting and shocking. And they are all unforgettable. Television reports, movies, newspapers and blogs about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have offered images of the fighting there. But this collection offers voices- powerful voices, telling the kind of truth that only fiction can offer.What makes the collection so remarkable is that all of these stories are written by those who were there, or waited for them at home. The anthology, which features a Foreword by National Book Award winner Colum McCann, includes the best voices of the wars' generation: award-winning author Phil Klay's Redeployment" Brian Turner, whose poem Hurt Locker" was the movie's inspiration Colby Buzzell, whose book My War resonates with countless veterans Siobhan Fallon, whose book You Know When the Men Are Gone echoes the joy and pain of the spouses left behind Matt Gallagher, whose book Kaboom captures the hilarity and horror of the modern military experience and ten others.

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. As the narratives of Conor's quest and his parents' lives twine and untwine, Collum McCann creates a mesmerizing evocation of the gulf between memory and imagination, love and loss, past and present.

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.

"From the Hardcover edition."

EIGHTY PIECES OF SHORT FICTION AND NONFICTION ON MANHOOD BY SOME OF THE WORLD'S BEST WRITERS, PRESENTED BY COLUM MCCANN, ESQUIRE, AND NARRATIVE 4
To help launch the literary nonprofit Narrative 4, "Esquire" asked eighty of the world's greatest writers to chip in with a story, all with the title, "How to Be a Man."
The result is "The Book of Men," an unflinching investigation into the essence of masculinity.
"The Book of Men" probes, with the poignant honesty and imagination that only these writers could deliver, the slippery condition of manhood. You will find men striving and searching, learning and failing to learn, triumphing and aspiring; men who are lost and men navigating their way toward redemption. These stories don't just explore what it is to be a man or how to achieve manliness, but ultimately what it is to be a human--with all of its uncertainty, complexity, clumsiness, and beauty.
With contributions from literary luminaries as diverse as the subjects they capture, and curated by the editors of "Esquire," National Book Award winner Colum McCann, and Narrative 4, a global nonprofit devoted to using storytelling as a means to empathy, "The Book of Men" might not teach you how to negotiate a deal or mix a Manhattan, but it does scratch at that most eternal of questions: What is a man?