Newfoundland, 1919. Aviators Jack Alcock and Teddy Brown conceived an epoch-making adventure - to make the first non-stop transatlantic flight. Dublin, 1845. Fugitive slave Frederick Douglass travels by sea from Boston to Dublin to tell the Irish what it is like to be someone else's property, chained. New York, 1998. Senator George Mitchell flies to Belfast to mediate a truce between the IRA and the British authorities. Men flock from America to Ireland to defeat injustice and end the bloodshed. Three generations of women cross the Atlantic to keep life going. They run from hunger or slowly swim across the ocean in search of themselves. And someone just stands on the shore and looks into the distance. And like a fragile bird, an envelope with a short letter to an Irish family floats over the ocean - a transatlantic letter that brings all these women and men closer together and connects their stories more reliably than the entire past of America and Ireland, hopeless wars and incredible peace. All lines will converge at one point, repeating the curves of world tragedies. Transatlantic is Colum McCann's most mature novel, a deep reflection on how History deals with people and how people change History. In the book, a multifaceted and ambiguous History spills out through the personal destinies of characters, real and imaginary, - this is a dense narrative of lives that were, are or could be, which, in general, is the same thing.