Originally published in 1995, this first novel from the author of the National Book Award winner Let the Great World Spin goes back to the years before the Spanish Civil War, and follows the adventures of a peripatetic Irish photographer from the war-strewn shores of Europe to the exotic plains of Mexico. Colum McCann tells the story in the words of the photographer's only son, a wanderer himself, who uses his father's unreliable memories and the fading remnants of his art to piece together his family history and understand the mystery surrounding his mother-a Mexican beauty brought back by his father to Ireland.