Colum writes: “Sometimes you just fall silent. There are just no ways to respond. I got this letter from Michael Cunningham while I was travelling in Europe. In fact I was sitting in an airport in Brussels on a flight from Dublin when I opened up my e-mail. I wrote back to Michael to say that I wanted to weep and he said, well, it probably wasn’t a good idea to weep in a Brussels airport. So instead of weeping I got myself a stiff drink and read it over and over again.

To get a letter like this from one of your all-time literary heroes is just about the most perfect thing ever. I’m almost embarrassed to share it but Michael wrote it, he said, because he wanted to share this book with everyone around him.

One of these days I might go back to the airport in Brussels just for a second drink ... "

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FROM MICHAEL CUNNINGHAM, Winner of the Pulitzer Prize

Every significant novel is an act of reckless originality. Colum McCann’s Apeirogon is a significant novel.

No significant novel resembles any other novel. Apeirogon is nothing like any book you’ve ever read.

One of the marks of a significant novel is the fact that it’s difficult to describe. Lesser books are easier to convey because they’re simpler, more conventional, in their plots, characters, and structures.

If I tell you that Apeirogon is about Israel and Palestine, I’ll need to tell you, as well, that it transcends even that ongoing cataclysm. It’s about the power of love and culture and tradition. It’s about cruelty and heroism, and the ways in which they can sometimes overlap.

It’s about the death of a daughter, and the shattering of a family. It’s about a piece of candy bought at a local shop and it’s about a traffic jam, both of which prove to have mortal consequences.

In McCann’s novel, nothing is unimportant. Everything is related to everything else, from genocide to the flight patterns of birds.

The novel’s highly unorthodox (and, yes, recklessly original) title is a term for a shape with a count-ably infinite number of sides. “County-ably infinite” in the same way we can start counting—one, two, three, and etc.—but will never have to stop, because numbers themselves never come to an end.

Apeirogon is exactly the right title for a book of this scale and complexity. It’s the right title for a narrative composed of stories that not only go on past the book’s final page but will inspire infinitely more stories, unknowable stories, after the reader has closed the book.

And, all right, if Apeirogon is not in any way like any of these books, think of reading David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, Anne Carson’s Autobiograpy of Red, or George Saunders’ Lincoln in the Bardo for the first time. Think of discovering an entirely unprecedented, and profoundly true, narrative form. Think about feeling that the very idea of the novel, of what it can be and what it’s capable of containing, has been expanded, forever.

In the final analysis, all I can really tell you is, read McCann’s book.
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Apeirogon: a shape with a countably infinite number of sides.