Everything in This Country Must: A Novella and Two Stories

An early collection by the National Book Award-winning author of Let the Great World Spin and Apeirogon

This devastating early collection from Colum McCann finds the National Book Award-winning author of Let the Great World Spin already exploring one of his most enduring themes: the reverberations of political violence in individual lives.

The setting is McCann's native Ireland in the time of the Troubles, a conflict that manifests both brutally and subtly in everyday life. In the title story, a teenage girl struggles to reconcile her gratitude to the British soldiers who saved the family's horse with her Catholic upbringing. "Wood," which first appeared in The New Yorker, depicts a boy attempting to help the Protestants under the nose of his blind, disapproving father. And in solidarity with his uncle, an imprisoned confederate of Bobby Sands, the teenage narrator of "Hunger Strike" mounts a resistance of his own.

Each story displays McCann's unique ability to capture the costs, emotional and psychological as well as physical, of violence, and reminds readers why he's been lauded as "one of the most compassionate writers alive" (Air Mail).


About the Author
Colum McCann is the author of seven novels, three collections of stories, and two works of nonfiction. Born and raised in Dublin, Ireland, he has been the recipient of many awards, including the National Book Award, the International Dublin Literary Prize, a Chevalier des Arts et Lettres, the 2010 Best Foreign Novel Award in China, and an Oscar nomination. He has been published in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Paris Review, The Guardian, and Granta, among others, and is a member of both the Irish arts academy and the American Academy of Arts. His work has been translated into over 40 languages.