It is All Souls Day, and the spirit of Marcus Conway sits at his kitchen table and remembers. He recalls his life in rural Ireland: as a boy and man, father, husband, citizen. Childhood memories of his father's deftness with machines turn to his own work as a civil engineer. As Conway's thoughts go outward, he stares down through the linked circumstances that combined to brought him into this single moment, and all the terror and gratitude that existence inspires.

"On All Souls Day, the late Marcus Conway returns home. Solar Bones captures in a single relentless sentence the life and death of this rural Irish engineer, and his place in the globally interconnected 21st century. The book takes in local municipal failures and global financial collapse, the quotidian pleasures of family, ancient history and the latest headlines, the living and the dead. A vital, tender, acerbic, warm, and death-haunted work one of Ireland's most important contemporary novelists, Solar Bones builds its own style and language one broken line at a time. The result is visionary accounting of the now"--

"The Routledge Companion to Death and Literature seeks to understand the ways in which literature has engaged deeply with the ever-evolving relationship humanity has with its ultimate demise. It is the most comprehensive collection in this growing field of study and includes essays by Brian McHale, Catherine Belling, Ronald Schleifer, Helen Swift and Ira Nadel, as well as the work of a generation of younger scholars from around the globe, who bring valuable transnational insights"--