According to Celtic code this means he must not only seek out and kill his father’s murderer, he must also ensure that all of the murderer’s heirs are slain. Violence and mayhem follow Cormac throughout the ages, particularly as he is on a quest to avenge his father’s brutal murder. During this time he also meets and falls in love with several women, learns many different trades, carries out various professions (printer, artist, journalist) and teaches himself a host of languages.īut this is no fairytale. Over the course of some 300 years he witnesses (and sometimes partakes in) many great scenes in history, including the American Revolution and the destruction of the World Trade Centre on 9/11. And because part of his deal is to ensure he lives a very full and active life, rather than sitting on the sidelines merely existing, he throws himself into all kinds of situations. It spans more than three centuries and tells the story of a poor rural Irish lad who is granted immortality, as long as he never steps foot off the island of Manhattan.
It’s part swashbuckling adventure, part romance, part historical drama, part fable. So it was with this critically acclaimed novel by Pete Hamill, the former editor in chief of the New York Post and the New York Daily News.Īt 613 pages I expected this hefty tome to last me a couple of weeks but I was so caught up in the life of Cormac O’Connor, an Irish immigrant who lands in New York in 1740 and remains…forever, that I raced through it in less than a week - and even then I tried to draw out the last hundred or so pages because I didn’t want it to end.
Sometimes you pick up a book and get totally swept away by the story that you forgot all sense of time or place.
Fi ction – paperback Back Bay Books 613 pages 2004.
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