Solar Bones

WINNER OF THE GOLDSMITHS PRIZE 2016 BGE IRISH BOOK OF THE YEAR 2016 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 of Solar Bones

Spellbinding * Irish Times * Extraordinary * Guardian * Exceptional indeed: an extraordinary novel … deserves attention and applause * Guardian * Difficult to put down. This is prose that reads as if it is being thought … reduced me to tears * New Statesman * Solar Bones is the encompassing flash of a life … compulsively readable * Irish Times * 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 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