Dancer

Author Colum McCann
Narrator Dion Graham
Publisher Bloomsbury Publishing
Run Time 10 hours and 46 minutes
Format Audio
Genre Dance, Historical fiction, Modern and contemporary fiction, The Arts.

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What to expect

'Remarkable ... nimble, lyrical and wispy' Sunday Times
'An utterly riveting, frequently moving, and staggeringly well-written book' Daily Mail
'Breathtaking' Guardian
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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.

Critics Review

The theme of towering celebrity and its attendant vacuity is very well done
The Times
McCann’s remarkable novel … McCann’s prose – nimble, lyrical and wispy – does full justice to the tragic story of a dancer who was the glory of his generation
Sunday 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
An utterly riveting, frequently moving, and staggeringly well-written book
Daily Mail
McCann’s agile, muscular prose creates its own energy and rhythm … he has taken one of the most charismatic characters of the 20th century and created a bold contemporary novel
Daily Telegraph
Like its subject, it spins with virtuoso, charismatic brilliance around a core of wilful mystery
Guardian
Here is an astonishing book. Colum McCann writes with a ferocious eloquence and a masterly sense of narrative … he has given us something wonderful
Spectator
Dancer brilliantly conveys Nureyev’s charisma. He haunted you. You couldn’t shake him off. His eyes were “complicated and blue”, and such is McCann’s skill and intuition, we penetrate that gaze
Daily Express
Employing a multiplicity of narrators, and skilfully interchanging between them … McCann produces a vivid, many-faceted portrait of the man. He succeeds in lifting Nureyev off the page and planting him firmly in the mind of the reader … There are charming vignettes … The range of wonderfully evoked settings is impressive
Scotland on Sunday
Dancer is an enticing read … McCann has an especially tender way with the human body
Observer
Here is what it feels like to be possessed by the genius of dance. It is the story of something mysterious and intangible, beauty combined with a potentially crude element, the human body … Dancer is an ambitious and thrilling novel
Times Literary Supplement
It is the bleak scenes of everyday Russian life, the school of hard knocks in which the genius was forged, that are the chief glory of a fine book
Sunday Telegraph
McCann takes the germ of an idea – the unknowable icon, the 1970s pinup – and with compassion and an outpouring of imagination, builds a ferociously original tale of that life’s gifts and iniquities
Independent on Sunday
A beautiful, floating novel about Nureyev’s life and art
New York Times Book Review

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