The national best-seller A Drinking Life is a poignant memoir of a boy growing up in Brooklyn during the Depression and World War II. The son of Irish immigrants, Pete Hamill is raised by his supportive mother, but feels overlooked by his crippled, alcoholic father. In a captivating narrative, Hamill reflects on his early experiences with alcohol and considers the personal implications of the American culture of drinking.

The short fiction of Colum McCann documents a dizzying cast of characters in exile, loss, love, and displacement. There is the worn boxing champion who steals clothes from a New Orleans laundromat, the rumored survivor of Hiroshima who emigrates to the tranquil coast of Western Ireland, the Irishwoman who journeys through America in search of silence and solitude. But what is found in these stories, and discovered by these characters, is the astonishing...