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Dancer cover art

Dancer

By: Colum McCann
Narrated by: Dion Graham
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Summary

Bloomsbury presents Dancer by Colum McCann, read by Dion Graham.

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.
©2003 Colum McCann (P)2021 Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Literary Fiction Historical Fiction
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Critic reviews

"The theme of towering celebrity and its attendant vacuity is very well done." (Chris Power, The Times)

"It's a strikingly original book, and as apparently effortless as one of Fonteyn's pirouettes or Nureyev's leaps into space." (Irish Times)

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Profile Image for Hilary Coupar

Better read?

I love Colum McCann’s writing. I found the narration very difficult for two reasons: the narrator had a very hoarse voice, which grated; and the story was written in many different voices, all of which were read in the same way making it hard to work out who was speaking at any given time.

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