Once a year, on All Souls’ Day, it is said in Ireland that the dead may return. Solar Bones is the story of one such visit. Marcus Conway, a middle-aged engineer, turns up one afternoon at his kitchen table and considers the events that took him away and then brought him home again.
Funny and strange, McCormack’s ambitious and other-worldly novel plays with form and defies convention. This profound new work is by one of Ireland’s most important contemporary novelists. A beautiful and haunting elegy, this story of order and chaos, love and loss captures how minor decisions ripple into waves and test our integrity every day.
'McCormack is one of our bravest and most innovative writers – he shoots for the stars with this one and does not fall short.' Kevin Barry
'Excellence is always rare and often unexpected: we don’t necessarily expect masterpieces even from the great. Mike McCormack’s Solar Bones is exceptional indeed: an extraordinary novel by a writer not yet famous but surely destined to be acclaimed by anyone who believes that the novel is not dead and that novelists are not merely lit-fest fodder for the metropolitan middle classes.' – The Guardian
'We could quote from Solar Bones for pages and pages; the ending left us dazed and it was a struggle not to immediately reread it. An immensely powerful book that blends the sublime and the everyday in a way that, if it doesn’t make you rethink the whole engineering profession, will definitely make you want to cheer McCormack onto this year’s prize lists. One of our top reads of the year so far.' – BookMunch
'… hauntingly sad, but also frequently very funny – Proust reconfigured by Flann O’Brien.' – Literary Review
Author
About Mike McCormack
Mike McCormack is an award-winning novelist and short story writer from Mayo. His previous work includes Getting it in the Head (1995), Crowe’s Requiem (1998), Notes from a Coma (2005), which was shortlisted for the Irish Book of the Year Award, and Forensic Songs (2012). In 1996 he was awarded the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature and in 2007 he was awarded a Civitella Ranieri Fellowship. He lives in Galway.
