Solar Bones - Tapa dura

A masterpiece -- Blake Morrison 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 * * Pure enchantment from an otherworldly talent. I admired the hell out of this book -- ELEANOR CATTON, Man Booker Prize-winning author of THE LUMINARIES 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 * * Irish Times * * 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 TOIBIN Hauntingly sad, but also frequently very funny - Proust reconfigured by Flann O'Brien -- Literary Review Exhilarating -- LISA McINERNEY This is prose that reads as if it is being thought . . . reduced me to tears * * New Statesman * * With stylistic gusto, and in rare, spare, precise and poetic prose, Mike McCormack gets to the music of what is happening all around us. One of the best novels of the year -- COLUM McCANN On every page, a celebration of the everyday, the odd, the incidental -- SARA BAUME

LONGLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE WINNER OF THE GOLDSMITHS PRIZE BGE IRISH BOOK OF THE YEAR LIMITED EDITION HARDBACK 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 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 - bridges, banking systems, marriages - are constructed - 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.