Solar Bones

WINNER OF THE GOLDSMITHS PRIZE 2016IRISH BOOK AWARDS NOVEL OF THE YEAROnce 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 of Solar Bones

Spellbinding * * Irish Times * * 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 * * A masterpiece . . . Its subject may be an ordinary working life, but it is itself an extraordinary work. — Blake Morrison Exhilarating . . . I may go into hiding so I can properly wallow in it — Lisa McInerney 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 Toibin This is an ordinary story told in the most extra-ordinary words. * * New Statesman * * 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 * * On every page, a celebration of the everyday, the odd, the incidental. — Sara Baume, author of SPILL SIMMER FALTER WITHER Hauntingly sad, but also frequently very funny – Proust reconfigured by Flann O'Brien. * * Literary Review * * 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 of BEATLEBONE