'Spins with virtuosic, charismatic brilliance around a core of wilful mystery' Guardian

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Russia in the 1940s. A small boy practises spinning on his mother's wooden floors, entranced by what he can make his body do. His momentum will propel him far from home; we watch him turn, through the lives of his teachers, his partners on and off stage, through the eyes of doormen and shoemakers, hustlers and nurses, through the rehearsal rooms of Moscow to Parisian opera houses to the streets of New York - ablaze as a comet, his light hot enough to catch and burn.

Masterfully blending fact and fiction to give an alternative biography of Rudolph Nureyev's life, Dancer is not only the story of one of the most important artists in history - but a biography of the twentieth century itself.

'McCann's agile, muscular prose creates its own energy and rhythm ... He has taken one of the most charismatic characters of the twentieth century and created a bold contemporary novel' Daily Telegraph

'Remarkable ... Does full justice to the tragic story of a dancer who was the glory of his generation' Sunday Times

'Here is an astonishing book. Colum McCann writes with a ferocious eloquence and a masterly sense of narrative' Spectator

Colum McCann, originally from Dublin, Ireland, is the author of six novels and two collections of stories. His most recent novel, the New York Times bestseller Let the Great World Spin, won the National Book Award, the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and several other major international awards. His fiction has been published in thirty-five languages. He lives in New York.

www.colummccann.com

This novel opens on a battlefield: trudging back from the front through a ravaged and icy wasteland, their horses dying around them, their own hunger rendering them almost savage, the Russian soldiers are exhausted as they reach the city of Ufa, desperate for food and shelter. They find both, and then music and dance. And there, spinning unafraid among them, dancing for the soldiers and anyone else who'll watch him, is one small pale boy, Rudolf. This is Colum McCann's dancer: Rudolf, a prodigy at six years old, who became the greatest dancer of the century, who redefined dance, rewrote his own life, and died of AIDS before anyone knew he had it.

This is an extraordinary life transformed into extraordinary fiction by one of the most acclaimed writers of his generation. One kind of masculine grace is perfectly matched to another in Colum McCann's beautiful and daring new novel.