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. 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.
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“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, New York Times bestselling author
“Wonderfully original, distinctly contemporary…Solar Bones takes a world that can’t stop talking about how broken it is and suggests it might possibly be whole.”
— New York Times Book Review“This is prose that reads as if it is being thought…reduced me to tears.”
— New Statesman“Hauntingly sad but also frequently very funny…Proust reconfigured by Flann O’Brien.
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Mike McCormack is an award-winning novelist and short story writer from County Mayo in Ireland. His previous work includes Forensic Songs; Notes from a Coma, which was shortlisted for the Irish Book of the Year Award; Crowe’s Requiem; and Getting It in the Head, which was awarded the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature and was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year.
Tim Gerard Reynolds is an established audiobook narrator who has won several AudioFile Earphones Awards and was a finalist for the prestigious Audie Award for Best Fantasy Narration. He trained for the stage at the Samuel Beckett Center at Trinity College in Dublin and the Eugene O’Neill Theatre Center in New London, Connecticut.