Solar Bones by Mike McCormack
Once a year, on All Souls Day, it is said that the dead may return; Solar Bones tells the story of one such visit.
Set in the west of Ireland as the recession is about to strike, this novel is a portrait of one man’s experience when his world threatens to fall apart.
Wry and poignant, Solar Bones is an intimate portrayal of one family, capturing how careless decisions ripple out into waves, and how our morals are challenged in small ways every day.
A book written in a single novel-length sentence has won the Goldsmiths Prize 2016. Solar Bones, published by Tramp Press, was named the winner of the £10,000 award which recognises fiction at its most novel.
The work was praised for its remarkable narrative which unfolds in one unbroken sentence and as a formally innovative novel which is also a moving and compelling read.
It follows the stream-of-consciousness recollections of a man named Marcus Conway, a middle-aged engineer from the west of Ireland briefly returned from the dead on All Soul’s Day, November 2008.
The work was praised for its remarkable narrative which unfolds in one unbroken sentence and as a formally innovative novel which is also a moving and compelling read.
McCormack is the fourth winner of the prize founded in 2013 by Goldsmiths, University of London and held in partnership with the New Statesman. He is the third Irish writer to win since the prize began.
Solar Bones was picked from a shortlist of six works – after an initial 111 works were submitted for the 2016 prize.
Longlistes for the Man Booker Prize
Winner of the Goldsmiths Prize
BGE Irish Book of the Year
Solar Bones
by Mike McCormack
ISBN101786891298
ISBN139781786891297
2017
Paperback
€ 12,99
Publ. Canongate
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From: Solar Bones
the Angelus bell
ringing out over its villages and townlands,
over the fields and hills and bogs in between,
six chimes of three across a minute and a half,
a summons struck
on the lip of the void
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 is 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.
Mike McCormack
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fleursdumal.nl magazine
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