Solar Bones

Plot

Longlisted for the 2017 Man Booker Prize Winner of the Goldsmiths Prize Winner of the Bord Gáis Energy Irish Book Awards Novel of the Year An Irish Times Book Club Choice "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, author of Let the Great World Spin and TransAtlantic 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. 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.