Solar Bones

Author(s): Mike McCormack

Fiction | Novel

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.

Written in one long sentence (in which line breaks perform as a higher order of comma), McCormack’s remarkable and enjoyable book succeeds at both stretching the formal possibilities of the novel (for which it was awarded the 2016 Goldsmiths Prize) and in being a gentle, unassuming and thoughtful portrait of a very ordinary life in a small and unremarkable Irish town. The flow of McCormack’s prose sensitively maps the flow of thought, drawing feeling and meaning from the patterning of quotidian detail as the narrator dissolves himself in the memories of which he is comprised. This wash of memory suggests that the narrator may in fact be dead, the narrative being the residue (or cumulation) of his life, the enduring body of attachments, thoughts and feelings that comprise the person. Few novels capture so well the texture of a person’s life, and this has been achieved through a rigorous experiment in form.


{THOMAS}


Product Information

Wimmer of the Goldsmiths Prize 2016.

General Fields

  • : 9780992817091
  • : Tramp Press
  • : Tramp Press
  • : May 2016
  • : Ireland
  • : books

Special Fields

  • : Mike McCormack
  • : Paperback
  • : May-16
  • : 823.92
  • : 223