Novelist Colum McCann shares a “Transatlantic” passage

Irish novelist Colum McCann turned more than a few heads with his 2009 work, Let the Great World Spin; it won major accolades, including the National Book Award. This week he flies back into the public eye with TransAtlantic, a novel that uses his signature entwined-narrative style to tell three stories: the first transatlantic airplane flight, Fredrick Douglas visiting Ireland in 1845, and the Irish peace process of the late 1990s – which is where he picks us up in this excerpt.