Apeirogon
Colum McCann
McCann's Booker-longlisted novel, built on the true story of two fathers — one Israeli, one Palestinian — who lost their daughters to the conflict and turned grief into a shared call for peace.
An apeirogon is a shape with a countably infinite number of sides — Colum McCann’s image for a conflict that cannot be reduced to two. At the center of this novel are two real men. Rami Elhanan, an Israeli, lost his thirteen-year-old daughter Smadar to a suicide bombing on Jerusalem’s Ben Yehuda Street in 1997. Bassam Aramin, a Palestinian raised near Hebron, jailed as a teenager and later a co-founder of Combatants for Peace, lost his ten-year-old daughter Abir to a rubber bullet fired by an Israeli soldier outside her school in Anata in 2007. Both became members of the Parents Circle–Families Forum, a group of bereaved Israeli and Palestinian families, and both now travel the world telling their stories side by side.
Around their friendship McCann builds a novel in 1,001 numbered sections, braiding history, ornithology, music, and mathematics into the fathers’ twin grief. Longlisted for the Booker Prize and a winner of a National Jewish Book Award, it was one of the most acclaimed novels of 2020.
About the author
Colum McCann is an Irish novelist, born in Dublin in 1965 and long resident in New York, where he teaches in the creative writing program at Hunter College. His novels include Let the Great World Spin, winner of the 2009 National Book Award, and TransAtlantic. He is a co-founder of Narrative 4, a global nonprofit that uses storytelling to build empathy.
Details
- Published by Random House, New York, 2020
- Longlisted for the 2020 Booker Prize; winner of a National Jewish Book Award
- ISBN 9781400069606