Colum McCann’s eighth novel turns the hyphen of Irish-American into an arrow pointing both ways. The heart of Transatlantic (Random House, $27), which opens with a harrowing 1919 flight from Newfoundland to Ireland in a Vickers Vimy, is the classic immigration tale. But when Lily Duggan, a Dublin housemaid, heads for America just as the potato blight is starting, her story is reported by Frederick Douglass, in Ireland on a lecture tour. Years later, the two meet in St. Louis, and Lily narrates that episode. As the novel moves around in time from the 1840s to 2011, characters recur, sons are shot in different civil wars, descendants multiply, and themes echo from one continent to the other. Eventually, Lily’s granddaughter marries an Irishman and moves to Belfast, bringing the family saga full circle. McCann has constructed the novel from seven interlocking sections, each one a tour de force of the precise, elegant prose that won him the National Book Award for Let the Great World Spin.
