Book Review: Apeirogon by Colum McCann

Telling the story of two fathers, one Israeli, one Palestinian, both of whom have lost their daughters in the region’s ongoing, bitter conflict, Apeirogon has been widely talked up as Colum McCann’s masterpiece.
Given that he has already won the International Dublin Literary Award (2011) and the National Book Award (2009) with Let The Great World Spin, that would be some claim to fame.

A hugely ambitious work, Apeirogon goes above and beyond the remit of a novel; mixing fact and fiction, it encompasses history, philosophy of religion, the patterns of aviation in the Middle East, the geography of this war-torn area, and much more.
It does this in order to give a new context to our understanding of the Israel-Palestine conflict. It is a book which takes its symbolism – an apeoirogon is a ‘generalised polygon with a countably infinite number of sides – its language, its form and itself very, very seriously.