Solar Bones
Mike McCormack
“the Angelus bell ringing out over its villages and townlands over the fields and hills and bogs in between, six chimes of three across a minute and a half, a summons struck on the lip of the void”
Available as Paperback, eBook, Downloadable audio
This masterpiece of a novel, narrated in a single sentence, is an international literary sensation. Longlisted for the 2017 Man Booker prize, BGE Irish Book of the Year 2016 and winner of the 2016 Goldsmiths Prize
WINNER OF THE INTERNATIONAL DUBLIN LITERARY AWARD
WINNER OF THE GOLDSMITHS PRIZE
LONGLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE
BGE IRISH BOOK OF THE YEAR 2016
Marcus Conway has come a long way to stand in the kitchen of his home and remember the rhythms and routines of his life. Considering with his engineer’s mind how things are constructed - bridges, banking systems, marriages - and how they may come apart.
Mike McCormack captures with tenderness and feeling, in continuous, flowing prose, a whole life, suspended in a single hour.
“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
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“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 TÓibÍn
“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
Mike McCormack
Mike McCormack is an award-winning novelist and short story writer from Mayo. His previous work includes Getting it in the Head (1996), Notes from a Coma (2005), which was shortlisted for BGE Irish Novel of the Year, and Forensic Songs (2012). In 1996 he was awarded the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature for Getting it in the Head and in 2007 he was awarded a Civitella Ranieri Fellowship. In 2016, Solar Bones won the Goldsmiths Prize and was BGE Irish Book of the Year, was longlisted for the Man Booker prize in 2017 and won the International Dublin Literary Award in 2018.
Mike McCormack speaks to the Guardian: “The generation behind me seem to be much more open to the idea of experiment. I sometimes think we forget that Irish writers are experimental writers. Our Mount Rushmore is Joyce, Beckett and Flann O’Brien, and if you’re not talking about those writers then you’ve lowered your gaze. For me they’re the father, son and holy ghost. They’ve nothing in common except they all went to some trouble to expand the received form, and there’s something of that happening again – a rejuvenation of the experimental instinct.”
Guardian
‘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…’
Ian Sansom
The Guardian
Mike McCormack wins €100,000 International Dublin literary award with one-sentence novel
“It’s not often that an author described on his own Wikipedia page as ‘disgracefully neglected’ is awarded a €100,000 literary prize. But this is where the Irish author Mike McCormack finds himself, with Wednesday’s announcement that he has won the International Dublin literary award for his novel, Solar Bones. As someone who has hovered close to mainstream success without ever shaking off the slightly damning label of ‘writer’s writer’, he is unsurprisingly delighted.”
Sian Cain
Guardian
‘McCormack brilliantly manages the pace and rhythm of each sentence, paragraph, page and sequence. The effect is to find oneself (to quote the narrator) ‘suspended in a time of stalled duration’, becalmed on the sea of memory.’
Literary Review
“Marcus is good company, I think, and that’s what drew me back to him again and again.” Mike McCormack discusses his beautiful, compulsive, elegaic novel Solar Bones, winner of the Goldsmiths Prize and the BGE Irish Book of the Year.
