McCormack’s ambitious and other-worldly novel is both simple and devilishly complex. 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 home.
Marcus Conway has come a long way to stand in the kitchen of his home and remember the rhythms and routines of his life. Considering with his engineer’s mind how things are constructed – bridges, banking systems, marriages – and how they may come apart. Everything seems normal, yet he is haunted by the feeling that nothing is quite right. Poring obsessively over the details of his relationships, his world and his work as an engineer brings him closer to an understanding of how the things and people he loves have come together, and how they have and must inevitably come apart.
Mike McCormack captures with tenderness and feeling, in continuous, flowing prose, a whole life, suspended in a single hour.
Winner of the International Dublin Literary Award 2018, Solar Bones is Mike McCormack’s multi-award-winning elegy to the merits of an ordinary life.
