Solar Bones

(Paperback, Main)

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WINNER 2018 Dublin International Literary Prize
WINNER OF THE GOLDSMITHS PRIZE 2016
IRISH BOOK AWARDS NOVEL OF THE YEAR

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.

Reviews

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 * * Guardian * *
Pure enchantment from an otherworldly talent. I admired the hell out of this book -- ELEANOR CATTON, Man Booker Prize-winning author of THE LUMINARIES
Wonderfully original, distinctly contemporary . . . delivered in lucid, lyrical prose . . . A pleasure to read * * New York Times * *
McCormack has always been among the most adventurous and ambitious Irish writers. Solar Bones, written in one single sonorous sentence, tells the story of a family in contemporary Ireland -- COLM TIBN
The writing catches fire as we draw near to the void, pass over into death itself, and therein confront the truth that even in a fallen universe, when all distractions tumble away, the only adequate response to our being is astonishment * * Irish Times * *
Exhilarating -- LISA McINERNEY
Hauntingly sad, but also frequently very funny - Proust reconfigured by Flann O'Brien -- Literary Review
Beautiful . . . Compulsive * * The Times * *
This is prose that reads as if it is being thought . . . reduced me to tears * * New Statesman * *
A masterpiece -- Blake Morrison
With stylistic gusto, and in rare, spare, precise and poetic prose, Mike McCormack gets to the music of what is happening all around us. One of the best novels of the year -- COLUM McCANN
On every page, a celebration of the everyday, the odd, the incidental -- SARA BAUME
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

Author Bio

Mike McCormack is an award-winning novelist and short story writer from Mayo. His previous work includes Getting it in the Head (1995), Notes from a Coma (2005), which was shortlisted for the Irish Book Awards Novel of the Year, 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. In 2016, Solar Bones won the Goldsmiths Prize and the Irish Book Awards Novel of the Year.