I was so disappointed that TransAtlantic failed to make the Booker shortlist when it clearly deserved to be there. The Guardian calls the 2013 selection ‘the best shortlist in a decade’ and I’m certainly looking forward to reading several of the listed books, particularly NZ author Eleanor Catton’s The Luminaries (although I didn’t check the page count when I downloaded it – over 800. Yikes! I’ll still be reading it next year).  

Still, despite the quality of the list, I would have placed TransAtlantic ahead of at least two that made it. Maybe it didn’t make the cut because its author is a long-time resident of New York. Anyway, it’s on my own list of favourites. 

TransAtlantic is a wonderful book, full of passages that need to be savoured and characters, real and imagined, whose crossings by air and sea between Europe and America through generations give the book its themes of risk and resistance fading to stoic endurance as the characters age. After reading Colum McCann it always takes me a long time to appreciate the writing of other authors again. He’s a writer whose style is so lyrically idiosyncratic that it makes most contemporary novelists seem part of a herd. Most of all, his evocation of places from Missouri to Ireland is just amazing. I could say more in praise but if you appreciate great literary fiction, read the book.