New York, NY: Random House (2015)

Paperback. Signed.

From the National Book Award–winning author of Let the Great World Spin, "a beautiful, floating novel about Rudolf Nureyev's life and art."—The New York Times Book Review

Dancer is the erotically charged story of the Russian dancer Rudolf Nureyev, told through the perspectives of those who knew him. There is Anna Vasileva, Rudi's ballet teacher, who rescues her protégé from the bleak and stunted life of his hometown; Yulia, whose sexual and artistic ambitions are thwarted by her Soviet-sanctioned marriage; and Victor, the Venezuelan hustler who reveals the lurid underside of the gay celebrity set. Spanning four decades and many worlds, from the horrors of the Second World War to the wild abandon of New York in the eighties, Dancer is peopled by an extravagant cast of the obscure and famous: doormen and shoemakers, nurses and translators, Margot Fonteyn, Erik Bruhn, and John Lennon. At the heart of the spectacle stands the artist himself, willful, lustful, and driven by a never-to-be-met need for perfection.

COLUM MCCANN is the author of the novels Zoli, Dancer, This Side of Brightness, and Songdogs, as well as two story collections. He has been a finalist for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and was the inaugural winner of the Ireland Fund of Monaco Literary Award. A contributor to The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, and The Paris Review, he teaches in the Hunter College MFA Creative Writing Program.