About this item

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.



About the Author

Mike McCormack

Mike McCormack is an award-winning novelist and short story writer from the West of Ireland. His work includes Getting it in the Head (1995) , a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, Notes from a Coma (2005) , shortlisted for the Irish Book of the Year Award and Forensic Songs (2012) . He was awarded the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature (1996) and a Civitella Ranieri Fellowship (2007) Solar Bones, his current novel, won the Goldsmiths Prize 2016, the BGE Irish Novel of the Year Award 2016, BGE Irish Book of the Year Award 2016 and nominated for the Man Booker Prize 2017.



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