'With Phillipe Petit's breathless 1974 tightrope walk between the uncompleted World Trade Centre towers at its axis, Colum McCann offers us a lyrical cycloramic high-low portrait of New York City in its days of burning; Park Avenue matrons, Bronx junkies, Center Street judges, downtown artists and their uptown subway-tagging brethren, street priests, weary cops, wearier hookers, grieving mothers of an Asian war freshly put to bed; a masterful chorus of voices all obliviously connected by the most ephemeral vision; a pin-dot of a man walking on air 110 storeys above their heads'

Richard Price

A blockbuster, groundbreaking, heartbreaking, symphony of a novel ... No novelist writing of New York has climbed higher, dived deeper'

Frank McCourt

'A giant amonst us - fearless, huge-hearted, a poet with every living breath'

Peter Carey

'An audacious and wonderfully skilled writer'

Joseph O'Connor