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. He lives in Galway.
Praise for Solar Bones
Longlisted for the 2017 Man Booker Prize
A Times (UK) Best Book of 2017
Winner of the Goldsmiths Prize
Winner of the International DUBLIN Literary Award
Winner of the Bord Gáis Energy Irish Book Awards Novel of the
Year
An NPR Best Book of 2017
An Irish Times Book Club Choice
A Chicago Public Library Best Book of 2017
A 2018 ALA Notable Book
"Wonderfully original, distinctly contemporary . . . Where
modernism took a world that appeared to be whole and showed it to
be broken, Solar Bones takes a world that can't stop
talking about how broken it is, and suggests it might possibly be
whole."
—The New York Times Book Review
"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
"Pure enchantment from an otherworldly talent. I admired the hell
out of this book."
—Eleanor Catton, Man Booker Prize–winning author of The
Luminaries
"Mike McCormack has created a narrative of such power and precision
. . . The book, contemporary and tragic and funny, is a
delight."
—NPR.org
"The ordinary is hallowed by the originality of its expression . .
. the writing is so precise and consistent. Solar
Bones is a successful experimental novel, but more than that
it is a good human story."
—The Wall Street Journal
"A Joycean novel about illness, suffering and work . . .
remarkable . . . poetic. It is the vivid attention to detail,
both in Ulysses, James Joyce’s masterpiece, and in Solar Bones,
which make both these novels resonate like that evening
bell."
—The Economist
"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
and that novelists are not merely lit-fest fodder for the
metropolitan middle classes."
—The Guardian
"A heady rumination on modern life as otherworldly as it is
grounded in reality."
—Entertainment Weekly
"Extraordinary . . . an intoxicating experimental
novel. Such experimentation may make some people hesitant;
don’t be, the prose flows more like poetry, and is a sombre joy to
read."
—Financial Times
"Clearly a major work. . . Solar Bones is a modernist
stream-of-consciousness novel à la James Joyce. Carefully
and cleverly crafted . . . Solar Bones is a must-read.
A fascinating, surprisingly readable tour de force of a
book."
—Winnipeg Free Press
"A lyrical rumination."
—Vulture
"A beautiful and strangely compulsive read."
—The Sunday Times (UK)
“Astonishing talent . . . Solar Bones is a lyrical masterpiece, of
a surprisingly accessible kind, that almost demands to be read
aloud.”
—The Sydney Morning Herald
“As in Don DeLillo’s White Noise, it is the numinous,
otherworldly qualities of modern life, rather than some fantastical
future, that we are concerned with here . . . The work of an author
in the full maturity of his talent, Solar Bones climaxes
in a passage of savage, Gnostic religiosity: 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.”
—The Irish Times
"An impressive meditation, as Joyce would say, 'upon all the living
and the dead' . . . Mike McCormack is a gifted Irish writer."
—Minneapolis Star Tribune
"One-of-a-kind. McCormack is a wonderfully accessible,
quick-witted writer—and, with references to Radiohead, Mad
Max, and the post-millennial Battlestar Galactica, a smartly
contemporary one. The book is alive with startling connections
between the exterior and interior worlds . . . an irresistible
driving rhythm. It's a book that demands a second reading and
readings of the author's other books . . . This transcendent novel
should expand McCormack's following on this side of the Atlantic
and further establish him as a heavyweight of contemporary Irish
fiction along with the likes of Anne Enright and Kevin
Barry."
—Kirkus Reviews, Starred Review
"The latest from McCormack is a beautifully constructed novel that
blends Beckett’s torrential monologues with a realist portrait of
small-town Ireland. This is an intelligent, striking
work."
—Publishers Weekly, Starred Review
"Solar Bones by Mike McCormack is a luminous poem cloaked in
the form of a novel. Sentences swoop and soar with flowing, almost
musical language, building to a climax of insight and grace.
McCormack proves himself to be a genius of language and form."
—Shelf Awareness, Starred Review
"McCormack’s third novel exhibits his startling imagination and
humor as well as a measured narrative style.This book is a
brilliant tour de force."
—Library Journal, Starred Review
"Mike McCormack’s harrowing novel, Solar Bones, is brave and
audacious, humane and concerned. A gem of a novel."
—CounterPunch
"In radiant, exquisite prose, Mike McCormack dilates time, erasing
the line between the external, concrete world and the interior
world of thought and feeling, memory and soul. Solar
Bones is a deeply affecting, mesmerizing and quietly
astonishing novel."
—Dana Spiotta, author of Innocents and Others
"Hauntingly sad, but also frequently very funny . . . Proust
reconfigured by Flann O’Brien."
—The Literary Review
"McCormack’s novel embraces a rich panorama of working life,
spiritual contemplation, and musings over Ireland’s economic woes.
Deserving a readership far larger than Irish-literature devotees,
this is a work of bold risks and luminous creativity."
—Booklist
"A deeply felt, discursive celebration of Life . . .
unquestionably art of the highest order. [Solar
Bones] regularly resembles both John Burnside and W.G. Sebald,
two writers similarly haunted by many of McCormack’s
preoccupations. "
—The Mookse and the Gripes
"McCormack is one of our bravest and most innovative writers—he
shoots for the stars with this one and does not fall short."
—Kevin Barry, author of Beatlebone
"One of the finest novels I’ve read in some time. Mike McCormack
has long been a powerhouse on the Irish literary map, beloved by
readers in the know, but with Solar Bones he has taken
things to another level; the rendering of life and death is
beautiful, generous and true, the language and its handling is
marvelous and new, the reckoning with power and its cruelties is
exactly as frank and relentless as such a reckoning needs, now, to
be. A pure and genuinely inspired vision; a brilliant mind charging
on."
—Belinda McKeon, author of Tender
"Solar Bones is like nothing I've read, an experimental novel about
love, engineering, and contaminated water that hits all three of
its targets: heart, head, and guts. This book gushes blood, and
McCormack's wondrous feat is to chart its movements with an
engineer's precision and a poet's ear. Solar Bones will draw
comparisons to Ulysses, and certainly its fluid stream-of-conscious
would do Joyce proud, but I was also reminded of another Irish
novel, Roddy Doyle's The Commitments—or, at least, the soundtrack
to its film adaptation—with its heavy concentration of blue-eyed
soul. This is a rare and beautiful novel, and one I won't soon
forget."
—Adam Wilson, author of Flatscreen
"A masterpiece."
—Blake Morrison, author of And When Did You Last See Your
Father?
"Exhilarating."
—Lisa McInerney, author of The Glorious Heresies
"Difficult to put down. This is prose that reads as if it is being
thought . . . reduced me to tears."
—New Statesman
"Mike McCormack's Solar Bones, with its one calmly unspooling
sentence, hearkens back to the great modernist novels, but
also moves forward from the present with all the urgency and
anxiety of our fraught new century. This is the kind of novel a
reader yearns for, one that illuminates what it means to be here
now. It's nothing short of a masterpiece."
—Stephen Sparks, Point Reyes Books
"Solar Bones is one of those books that comes around once every few
years and kicks the crap out of you. Mike McCormack creates a
terrifyingly real and startling world through the eyes of the late
Marcus Conway, a civil engineer who reflects upon his life in one
long transcendent, stream-of-conscious narrative. Memories bleed
into one another, as the ghost of a man sits at his kitchen table
and recalls event after event, which tip into one another
satisfyingly, until we're left with a portrait of a man situated in
the twenty-first century, where global catastrophes and politics
threaten and impact our sometimes isolate bubbles of everyday life.
Almost Knausgaardian in spirit, this novel celebrates and honors
the working man's life—failures, successes, and all the idleness
and fate sandwiched in between."
—John Gibbs, Green Apple Books on the Park
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