Solar Bones

WINNER 2018 Dublin International Literary Prize
WINNER OF THE GOLDSMITHS PRIZE 2016
IRISH BOOK AWARDS NOVEL OF THE YEAR

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.

Winner of The Goldsmiths Prize 2016 (UK) Winner of Bord Gáis Energy Irish Book Awards - Eason Novel of the Year 2016 (Ireland) Winner of International IMPAC DUBLIN Literary Award 2018 (Ireland) Long-listed for The Man Booker Prize 2017 (UK)

“A masterpiece”

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
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
Exhilarating -- LISA McINERNEY
Hauntingly sad, but also frequently very funny - Proust reconfigured by Flann O'Brien -- Literary Review
Beautiful . . . Compulsive The Times
This is prose that reads as if it is being thought . . . reduced me to tears New Statesman
-- Blake Morrison

Mike McCormack is an award-winning novelist and short story writer from Mayo. His previous work includes Getting it in the Head (1995), Notes from a Coma (2005), which was shortlisted for the Irish Book Awards Novel of the Year, and Forensic Songs (2012). In 1996 he was awarded the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature and in 2007 he was awarded a Civitella Ranieri Fellowship. In 2016, Solar Bones won the Goldsmiths Prize and the Irish Book Awards Novel of the Year.

Longlisted for the 2017 Man Booker Prize: this 'masterpiece' of a novel, is an international literary sensation, winner of the Goldsmiths Prize and Irish Book Awards Novel of the Year. WINNER 2018 Dublin International Literary Prize WINNER OF THE GOLDSMITHS PRIZE 2016 IRISH BOOK AWARDS NOVEL OF THE YEAR 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.

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