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Solar Bones

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Solar Bones

By: Mike McCormack
Narrated by: Tim Gerard Reynolds
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Summary

WINNER OF THE INTERNATIONAL DUBLIN LITERARY AWARD
WINNER OF THE GOLDSMITHS PRIZE
LONGLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE
BGE IRISH BOOK OF THE YEAR 2016

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.

Mike McCormack captures with tenderness and feeling, in continuous, flowing prose, a whole life, suspended in a single hour.

 Fiction Genre Fiction Literary Fiction

Critic Reviews

"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"
"Pure enchantment from an otherworldly talent. I admired the hell out of this book" (ELEANOR CATTON, Man Booker Prize-winning author of THE LUMINARIES)
"Wonderfully original, distinctly contemporary . . . delivered in lucid, lyrical prose . . . A pleasure to read"
"McCormack has always been among the most adventurous and ambitious Irish writers. Solar Bones, written in one single sonorous sentence, tells the story of a family in contemporary Ireland" (COLM TÓIBÍN)
"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"
"Exhilarating" (LISA McINERNEY)
"Hauntingly sad, but also frequently very funny - Proust reconfigured by Flann O'Brien" (Literary Review)
"Beautiful . . . Compulsive"
"This is prose that reads as if it is being thought . . . reduced me to tears"
"A masterpiece" (Blake Morrison)
All stars
Most relevant
Despite the beauty of the writing, which is on occasionpoetic and powerful, this book is a monologue where one middle aged man revisits and narrates his life. Like most lives, it has its moments of interest, but more that is humdrum and tedious. Much of the story had me silently urging the narrator to speed on, just to get through the more mundane experiences of the main character. I was so bored by his memories of arguments with co-workers over the consistency and makeup of concrete that I had to force myself to keep listening. I got to the end, which was too predictable to be shocking, but it was hard going sometimes. The narrator did a good job, but the overall story was as dull as most ordinary lives are. The beautiful writing couldn’t save the mundanity of the subject’s life.

The tedium of an ordinary life

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Fantastic! Very hight level of literature. The language is amazing. The story is complete. I like everything about this book. Thank you

Solar of bones

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