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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