Apeirogon

Beautiful, like everything McCann writes, but definitely a departure. It's not the first time he's used non-fiction to frame his work, but it's very hard here to see the line between non-fiction and fiction here. The structure might be the first thing one notices. It is in 1001 sections, a reference to One Thousand and One Nights, the classic work of Arabic literature that is mentioned several times. but the structure is meant, I'd guess, to approximate an apeirogon, a figure of countably infinite sides, a circle made up of straight lines, thus counting upward to 5oo and then back down to 1. But that gimmick aside, the book is about the inhumanity of occupation, and while the book is about the Israeli occupation of Palestine, the message is larger than that. Perhaps not my favorite of McCann's books, but also, perhaps, his most powerful.