Mike McCormack. (2017). Solar Bones. Soho Press.

Mike McCormack. 2017. Solar Bones. Soho Press.

Mike McCormack, Solar Bones. Soho Press, 2017.

Mike McCormack. Solar Bones. Soho Press, 2017.

OverDrive Product Record

sortTitle

Solar Bones

crossRefId

3217012

images

• cover:
  • href: https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-100/0111-1/{4992AC40-49A7-4CD7-91BE-1FDE9F63F082}Img100.jpg
  • type: image/jpeg
• thumbnail:
  • href: https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-200/0111-1/{4992AC40-49A7-4CD7-91BE-1FDE9F63F082}Img200.jpg
  • type: image/jpeg
• cover150Wide:
  • href: https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-150/0111-1/499/2AC/40/{4992AC40-49A7-4CD7-91BE-1FDE9F63F082}Img150.jpg
  • type: image/jpeg
• cover300Wide:
  • href: https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-400/0111-1/499/2AC/40/{4992AC40-49A7-4CD7-91BE-1FDE9F63F082}Img400.jpg
  • type: image/jpeg

formats

1. • identifiers:
     1. • type: ISBN
        • value: 9781616958541
     2. • type: PublisherCatalogNumber
        • value: 555487
   • name: Adobe EPUB eBook
   • id: ebook-epub-adobe
2. • identifiers:
     1. • type: ASIN
        • value: B01N4HHS1A
     2. • type: PublisherCatalogNumber
        • value: 555487
   • name: Kindle Book
   • id: ebook-kindle
3. • identifiers:
     1. • type: ISBN
        • value: 9781616958541
     2. • type: PublisherCatalogNumber
        • value: 555487
   • name: OverDrive Read
   • id: ebook-overdrive

mediaType

eBook

primaryCreator

• role: Author
• name: Mike McCormack

id

4992ac40-49a7-4cd7-91be-1fde9f63f082

title

Solar Bones

starRating

3.4

dateAdded

2017-08-04T12:39:00-04:00

contentDetails

1. • href: https://link.overdrive.com/?websiteID=141&titleID=3217012
   • type: text/html
   • account:
     • name: Sacramento Public Library (CA)
     • id: 1151

OverDrive MetaData

isPublicDomain

False

formats

1. • fileName: SolarBones_9781616958541_3217012
   • partCount: 0
   • fileSize: 1854136
   • identifiers:
     1. • type: ISBN
        • value: 9781616958541
     2. • type: PublisherCatalogNumber
        • value: 555487
   • rights:
     1. • type: Copying
        • value: 0
     2. • type: Printing
        • value: 0
     3. • type: Lending
        • value: 0
     4. • type: ReadAloud
        • value: 0
     5. • type: ExpirationRights
        • value: 0
   • name: Adobe EPUB eBook
   • isReadAlong: False
   • id: ebook-epub-adobe
   • onSaleDate: 9/12/2017
   • samples:
     1. • source: From the book
        • formatType: ebook-overdrive
        • url: https://samples.overdrive.com/?crid=4992ac40-49a7-4cd7-91be-1fde9f63f082&.epub-sample.overdrive.com
2. • fileName: SolarBones_3217012
   • partCount: 0
   • fileSize: 0
   • identifiers:
     1. • type: PublisherCatalogNumber
        • value: 555487
     2. • type: ASIN
        • value: B01N4HHS1A
   • name: Kindle Book
   • isReadAlong: False
   • id: ebook-kindle
   • onSaleDate: 9/12/2017
   • samples:
     1. • source: From the book
        • formatType: ebook-overdrive
        • url: https://samples.overdrive.com/?crid=4992ac40-49a7-4cd7-91be-1fde9f63f082&.epub-sample.overdrive.com
3. • fileName: SolarBones_9781616958541_3217012
   • partCount: 0
   • fileSize: 1854142
   • identifiers:
     1. • type: ISBN
        • value: 9781616958541
     2. • type: PublisherCatalogNumber
        • value: 555487
   • name: OverDrive Read
   • isReadAlong: False
   • id: ebook-overdrive
   • onSaleDate: 9/12/2017
   • samples:
     1. • source: From the book
        • formatType: ebook-overdrive
        • url: https://samples.overdrive.com/?crid=4992ac40-49a7-4cd7-91be-1fde9f63f082&.epub-sample.overdrive.com

keywords

1. • value: Animals
2. • value: family
3. • value: relationships
4. • value: Friendship
5. • value: literary fiction
6. • value: loneliness
7. • value: challenging
8. • value: romance
9. • value: small town
10. • value: ghosts
11. • value: Death and Dying
12. • value: Avant Garde
13. • value: Fiction
14. • value: crime
15. • value: novels
16. • value: Journalism
17. • value: marriage
18. • value: love
19. • value: Death
20. • value: suspense
21. • value: memory
22. • value: mystery
23. • value: Drama
24. • value: Horror
25. • value: Engineer
26. • value: unconventional
27. • value: Thriller
28. • value: grief
29. • value: americana
30. • value: rural
31. • value: haunting
32. • value: lyrical
33. • value: Chick Lit
34. • value: Technology
35. • value: community
36. • value: literature
37. • value: American Literature
38. • value: fiction books
39. • value: book club books
40. • value: all saints day
41. • value: kitchen stories
42. • value: Solar Bones
43. • value: realistic fiction books
44. • value: books fiction
45. • value: penguin classics paperback

creators

1. • role: Author
   • fileAs: McCormack, Mike
   • bioText: Mike McCormack is an award-winning novelist and short story writer from County Mayo in Ireland. His previous work includes Forensic Songs; Notes from a Coma, which was shortlisted for the Irish Book of the Year Award; Crowe’s Requiem; and Getting It in the Head, which was awarded the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature and was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. He lives in Galway.
   • name: Mike McCormack

publishDate

2017-09-12T00:00:00-04:00

isOwnedByCollections

True

title

Solar Bones

fullDescription

Longlisted for the 2017 Man Booker Prize
Winner of the Goldsmiths Prize
Winner of the Bord Gáis Energy Irish Book Awards Novel of the Year 
An Irish Times Book Club Choice
"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, author of Let the Great World Spin and TransAtlantic 
Solar Bones is a masterwork that builds its own style and language one broken line at a time; the result is a visionary accounting of the now.
A vital, tender, death-haunted work by one of Ireland’s most important contemporary writers, Solar Bones is a celebration of the unexpected beauty of life and of language, and our inescapable nearness to our last end. It is All Souls Day, and the spirit of Marcus Conway sits at his kitchen table and remembers. In flowing, relentless prose, Conway recalls his life in rural Ireland: as a boy and man, father, husband, citizen. His ruminations move from childhood memories of his father’s deftness with machines to his own work as a civil engineer, from transformations in the local economy to the tidal wave of global financial collapse. Conway’s thoughts go still further, outward to the vast systems of time and history that hold us all. He stares down through the “vortex of his being,” surveying all the linked circumstances that combined to bring him into this single moment, and he makes us feel, if only for an instant, all the terror and gratitude that existence inspires.

reviews

1. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     Starred review from July 10, 2017
     The latest from McCormack (Notes from a Coma) is a beautifully constructed novel that blends Beckett’s torrential monologues with a realist portrait of small-town Ireland. The book opens with short, fragmented descriptions of the “systolic thump” of a church bell heard by a man, Marcus Conway, standing in his kitchen. He is a civil engineer and a one-time seminary student who lives on the west coast of Ireland, at “the edge of this known world.” Waiting for his wife and children to return home, Marcus is struck by the “twitchy energy in the ether,” mystified at being “swept up on a rush of words” and bombarded with “a hail of images.” Free of periods, the one-sentence novel is comprised of Marcus’s unceasing reflections and recollections, some lyrical and tender, others caustic, on his childhood, family, politics, and local building projects. He marvels at the miraculous construction of the world while feeling a sense of foreboding at its imminent unravelling. Bodies, minds, buildings, financial systems, the civic order, and the universe itself—“the whole vast assemblage of stars and galaxies in their wheeling rotations”—all seem poised of the brink of collapse. As Marcus waxes eloquent on everything from tractor parts to concrete foundations, the novel’s suspense derives from the mystery of why this “strange” day—All Souls’ Day, as it happens—occasions such an “unspooling” of the mind. This is an intelligent, striking work.

2. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     Starred review from August 1, 2017
     In this one-of-a-kind Irish novel, consisting of a single sentence a la Molly Bloom's interior monologue in Ulysses, a middle-aged man reflects on his life.Alone in his kitchen on All Souls' Day, Marcus Conway free-associates on everything from his pained family history to his physical surroundings in rural County Mayo to local politics to an unspeakable health crisis that hits home. And then there is the role he may have played as a civil engineer in the local building boom gone bust. For all his high artistic aims, McCormack is a wonderfully accessible, quick-witted writer--and, with references to Radiohead, Mad Max, and the post-millennial Battlestar Galactica, a smartly contemporary one. The book is alive with startling connections between the exterior and interior worlds (a dismantled wind turbine being hauled down the main drag "might well have been God himself") and Marcus' former and current selves. He is inspired to reappraise himself as a man and a father by the "inner harrowing" he experiences at his artist daughter's first solo exhibition, for which she duplicated, in the medium of her own blood, court reports from local newspapers. Had he failed her? McCormack breaks up his nonstop sentence with brief poetic spurts ("who made the world/God made the world/and who is God/God is our father in heaven/and so on and so on/to infinity") that give the book an irresistible driving rhythm. It's a book that demands a second reading and readings of the author's other books, including Getting it in the Head (1998) and Notes from a Coma (20013). This transcendent novel should expand McCormack's following on this side of the Atlantic and further establish him as a heavyweight of contemporary Irish fiction along with the likes of Anne Enright and Kevin Barry.

     COPYRIGHT(2017) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

3. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     August 1, 2017
     McCormack won the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature for his first collection of short fiction, Getting It in the Head (1996), and quickly attracted a widespread following in literary circles for his eccentric but mesmerizing writing style. His latest work, already anointed Novel of the Year by the Irish Book Awards, challenges readers with an elegiac, stream-of-consciousness narrative composed entirely of one long run-on sentence, often broken up into more digestible verse-like lines. Taking place in and around a rural village in County Mayo, where McCormack grew up, the storyif this term even appliesdescribes the interwoven memories and reflections passing through the mind of civil engineer Marcus Conway as he sits in his kitchen one early November afternoon. Shifting back and forth across time from Conway's childhood on a farm through his early marriage and later career, McCormack's novel embraces a rich panorama of working life, spiritual contemplation, and musings over Ireland's economic woes. Deserving a readership far larger than Irish-literature devotees, this is a work of bold risks and luminous creativity.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)

4. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     Starred review from July 1, 2017
     

     As the Angelus tolls on All Soul's Day, Marcus Conway's ghost visits the house that he shared with his family in Louisburgh, County Mayo, Ireland. There, he reassembles the facts of his earthly existence from memory. An engineer in life, Marcus delights in the forms and structures, both natural and human made, that shape our existence. For our protagonist, life's dark comedy arises from the habit of being mystified by existence despite being defined by structure, from the stunning natural features of County Mayo's coastlines and hills, Louisburgh's buildings and thoroughfares, to the bones, tissues, and fluids that to varying degrees make up earthly life. The arrangement of a sandwich on a plate delights Marcus as much as a wind turbine does, and much of his afterlife musings consider how human factors such as politics and property compromise potentially perfect designs. McCormack's third novel (after Notes from a Coma, short-listed for the Irish Book of the Year Award) exhibits his startling imagination and humor as well as a measured narrative style that departs from the more rapid delivery characteristic of his earlier prose. VERDICT Widely praised, this book is a brilliant tour de force. [See Prepub Alert, 4/10/17.]--John G. Matthews, Washington State Univ. Libs., Pullman

     Copyright 2017 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

popularity

552

links

• self:
  • href: https://api.overdrive.com/v1/collections/v1L1BWwAAAA2I/products/4992ac40-49a7-4cd7-91be-1fde9f63f082/metadata
  • type: application/vnd.overdrive.api+json

id

4992ac40-49a7-4cd7-91be-1fde9f63f082

starRating

3.6

images

• cover:
  • href: https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-100/0111-1/{4992AC40-49A7-4CD7-91BE-1FDE9F63F082}Img100.jpg
  • type: image/jpeg
• thumbnail:
  • href: https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-200/0111-1/{4992AC40-49A7-4CD7-91BE-1FDE9F63F082}Img200.jpg
  • type: image/jpeg
• cover150Wide:
  • href: https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-150/0111-1/499/2AC/40/{4992AC40-49A7-4CD7-91BE-1FDE9F63F082}Img150.jpg
  • type: image/jpeg
• cover300Wide:
  • href: https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-400/0111-1/499/2AC/40/{4992AC40-49A7-4CD7-91BE-1FDE9F63F082}Img400.jpg
  • type: image/jpeg

isPublicPerformanceAllowed

False

languages

1. • code: en
   • name: English

subjects

1. • value: Fiction
2. • value: Literature

publishDateText

09/12/2017

otherFormatIdentifiers

1. • type: ISBN
   • value: 9781616958534

mediaType

eBook

shortDescription

Longlisted for the 2017 Man Booker Prize
Winner of the Goldsmiths Prize
Winner of the Bord Gáis Energy Irish Book Awards Novel of the Year 
An Irish Times Book Club Choice
"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, author of Let the Great World Spin and TransAtlantic 
Solar Bones is a masterwork that builds its own style and language one broken line at a time; the result is a visionary accounting of the now.
A vital, tender, death-haunted work by one of Ireland’s most important contemporary writers, Solar Bones is a celebration of the unexpected beauty of life and of language, and our inescapable nearness to our last end. It is All Souls Day, and the spirit of Marcus Conway sits at his kitchen...

sortTitle

Solar Bones

crossRefId

3217012

awards

1. • source: Notable Books Council
   • value: Notable Books for Adults

publisher

Soho Press

bisacCodes

1. • code: FIC019000
   • description: Fiction / Literary
2. • code: FIC045000
   • description: Fiction / Family Life / General
3. • code: FIC066000
   • description: Fiction / Small Town & Rural