This Side of Brightness

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This Side of Brightness: A Novel

Author: Colum McCann
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Publisher: Picador USA
In the early years of the century, Nathan Walker leaves the Okefenokee swamps of his native Georgia for New York City and the most dangerous job in America. A sandhog, he burrows beneath the East River, digging the underground tunnel that will carry trains between Brooklyn and Manhattan. In the bowels of the riverbed the sandhogs—black, white, Irish, Italian—dig together; above ground, though, the men keep their distance until a spectacular accident welds a bond between Walker and his fellow sandhogs that will bless and curse the next three generations.

Years later, Treefrog, a homeless man driven below by a shameful secret, endures a punishing winter deep in his subway nest. In tones ranging from bleak to dark to disturbingly funny, Treefrog recounts his strategies of survival—killing rats, scavenging for soda cans, washing in the snow, sleeping through the cold—in New York’s netherworld.

Between Nathan Walker and Treefrog stretch seventy years of ill-fated loves, unintended crimes, and social taboos. The two stories fuse to form a tale of family, race, and redemption.

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Amazon.com

This Side of Brightness weaves historical fact with fictional truth, creating a remarkable tale of death, racism, homelessness--and yes, love--spanning four generations. Two characters dominate Colum McCann's narrative: Treefrog (born Clarence Nathan Walker), a homeless man with a dark and shameful secret, and his grandfather Nathan Walker, a black man who came north in the early years of the century to work as a "sandhog", digging the subway tunnels beneath Manhattan. Tunnelling is perhaps the most dangerous occupation a man could have; in the close, dark and dangerous pits far beneath the city streets, differences such as colour or ethnic background cease to matter and Walker soon becomes friends with his crewmates: two Irishmen and an Italian. Then an explosion in one of the tunnels literally blows Walker and three other men up through the earth and into the East River. Walker survives but his best friend Con O'Leary is never found. Leary leaves behind a wife and young daughter whom Walker marries many years later. Walker's tale is told in alternating chapters with Treefrog's, who, like his grandfather, chose a hazardous profession--this one high up in the bright sunlight--as a construction worker building skyscrapers. But madness has brought Treefrog out of the light and back to the tunnels his grandfather helped dig as he scrapes out a meagre existence among the drug addicts, alcoholics, prostitutes and petty criminals that make up the homeless community. But the grimness of McCann's tale is leavened by the beauty of his prose and the intimations all through the book that, even on this side of darkness, redemption is possible. Guy Smit

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