Longlisted for the 2017 Man Booker Prize
Winner of the Goldsmiths Prize
Winner of the Bord Gáis Energy Irish Book Awards Novel of the Year
An Irish Times Book Club Choice
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, author of Let the Great
World Spin and TransAtlantic
Solar Bones is a masterwork that builds its own style and language one
broken line at a time; the result is a visionary accounting of the now.
A vital, tender, death-haunted work by one of Ireland's most important
contemporary writers, Solar Bones is a celebration of the unexpected
beauty of life and of language, and our inescapable nearness to our last
end. It is All Souls Day, and the spirit of Marcus Conway sits at his
kitchen table and remembers. In flowing, relentless prose, Conway
recalls his life in rural Ireland: as a boy and man, father, husband,
citizen. His ruminations move from childhood memories of his father's
deftness with machines to his own work as a civil engineer, from
transformations in the local economy to the tidal wave of global
financial collapse. Conway's thoughts go still further, outward to the
vast systems of time and history that hold us all. He stares down
through the "vortex of his being," surveying all the linked
circumstances that combined to bring him into this single moment, and he
makes us feel, if only for an instant, all the terror and gratitude that
existence inspires.
