On All Souls Day, the spirit of Marcus Conway sits at his kitchen table and recalls, in flowing, relentless prose, his life in rural Ireland. A vital, tender, death-haunted work by one of Ireland's finest contemporary writers, Solar Bones celebrates the unexpected beauty of life and of language, and our inescapable nearness to our last end.
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 Guardian