Colum McCann is an Irish writer, born in Dublin, who has achieved international recognition for his previous work: In 2003 he was named Esquire magazine’s Writer of the Year, and is a winner of the National Book Award for fiction for “Let the Great World Spin,” published in 2009.

He currently lives with his family in New York and teaches writing at Hunter College.

The touchstone of place in his most recent work, “TransAtlantic,” is Ireland, not surprisingly. We arrive there by air, in 1919, when two wunderkinds of flight, John Alcock and “Teddy” Brown, make their historic flight from Newfoundland to Éire, the first of its kind to carry mail from the new world to the old. The novel is peopled by historic figures: Alcott and Brown, the anti-slave fighter Frederick Douglas, and Maine Senator, George Mitchell, as peace facilitator during the historic Northern Ireland peace talks of the 1990s.

But it is not these important and impressive historic figures that carry the narrative forward, which makes it not strictly an historical fiction. They play the part of scaffolding for the real structure of the story, which is built with the interlinking stories of four generations of women that cover the novel’s 150 year time frame. And because it’s these fictional characters that are the heart of “TransAtlantic,” the book is more of a domestic epic.

The book’s chapters jump from the 1920s back in time and forward again, and so the novel goes. McGann is a master at bringing this all together by creating such powerful tales carried by these women, all different, but linked by blood, and by love as real as the challenges they face. It is also the power of McGann’s writing that draw the reader in. It is sparse, yet full of emotion in its observations of the human drama.

The drama really begins when Lily Duggan, the maid in the house of Frederick Douglas and a guest during his tour of Ireland, preaching of the inhumanity of slavery. But in Ireland, Douglas witnesses conditions, at the cusp of the great potato famine, that challenge his preconceptions. He sees starvation and poverty he had never encountered in America.

Lily, the progenitor of all the women to follow, sees in Douglas’ example a way forward for herself, a way out of her own kind of bondage. And Lily begins literally to walk her way to her own freedom. What follows is a powerful story of endurance, affection, and familial bonds that, when the final chapter, set back in the hauntingly beautiful geography of Ireland, is over will have you considering how history is truly made.

I highly recommend this latest by the gifted McGann.