Let the Great World Spin, from Irish author Colum McCann, is a fictionalized account of Phillipe Petit's 1974 high-wire walk between the towers of New York's World Trade Center. It was a daring and mesmerizing creative act that documentary filmmaker James Marsh captured in the 2008 award-winning documentary Man on Wire. Rather than trying to cover the same territory, McCann moves Petit off to the periphery, allowing his other characters and their reactions to the event to dominate his narrative.

The book is nominally about the interplay between a pair of grown Irish brothers who have come to New York separately, following the independent deaths of their parents. One is a priest who works with prostitutes; the other is an aspiring writer, relegated to working in the city's Irish expat bars. Petit crossing the chasm between the towers becomes the centrifugal act that whirls the brothers and the prostitutes from the borderlands of the Bronx stroll, to the inner workings of Manhattan, crossing paths with bohemians, socialites, drug-users, judges, police officers, war mothers and even Petit.

The most prominent character, however, is New York City. McCann, who moved to New York in 1994, just as the city was beginning to shake itself out of its decades-long slumber, uses the relationships between his characters to negotiate the psychic geography of the city during one of its bleakest periods. Petit’s seemingly impossible walk allows for reflection on their own dreams — the brother who came to write a great novel, or save souls; the Bronx prostitute who vowed a better life for her daughter, only to live to see her daughter follow in the same drug-strewn path; the judge who once dreamed of cleaning up the city, but now must usher petty criminals through the judicial system before it collapses under its own weight; the mothers of the Vietnam dead who cross the city to meet and share their perpetual grief. All of these dreams have broken on the shorelines of New York. Petit, alone and visible against the sky, becomes a moment of emotional relief.

In his acceptance of the National Book Award for Let the Great World Spin, McCann says that the novel was inspired by 9/11, with the early death of two characters serving as an allegory for the fall of the World Trade Center. The rest of the novel is meant to mirror the reactions and acts of compassion he witnessed in 9/11's immediate aftermath.

Let the Great World Spin is a long last look at the New York of legend; the dirty, grimy, crime-filled city that Mayor Giuliani vowed to clean up, that 9/11 humbled and the post-2001 housing boom sanitized. McCann’s portrait catches it as a city that barked, bit, fell back in on itself for strength, and accepted the sadness, anger and passion it evoked.