Another great novel by the author of my favorite novel of 2011, Let the Great World Spin.  In this book, McCann uses a similar device of weaving together fictional and real characters through extended time and space—-Senator George Mitchell and the freed slave, Frederick Douglass.  The latter travels in Ireland in 1845 lecturing about slavery and abolition and crossing paths with Lily Duggin, a maid in Douglass’s publisher’s house in Belfast.  Eventually, Duggin travels to the US and Canada where she raises a family and becomes a newspaperwoman and witnesses the takeoff of the first transatlantic flight by Alcock and Brown, and…..Well you get the idea—-vast expanse with brilliant connections of the quotidian with the historic.  “What was life anyway? An accumulation of small shelves of incident.  Stacked at odd angles to each other.”  I’m ready to read anything that McCann writes in the future.  Great author.