2018 – Solar Bones

Winner of the 2018 Award

The Judges’ Citation

Formally ambitious, stylistically dauntless and linguistically spirited, Solar Bones is a novel of extraordinary assurance and scope. That its protagonist, Marcus Conway, is dead we know from the back cover blurb: the novel’s task is, through the miracle of language, to bring him back to life. And so it does, bringing him back to his life, a life experienced as both ordinary (in its daily routines) and extraordinary (in its probing of what it means to be alive).

Marcus Conway is a complex and challenging hero: a flawed, bullish and impatient protagonist, but a compelling character nonetheless who engineers his private and public selves into a finely-tuned consciousness that animates and underwrites every episode of this remembered life. Marcus’ memory is exhaustive, ranging between the various circumstances of his family and work lives. The novel is episodic and what runs under each episode is a current of intense feeling and keenly-honed attention.

In this probing of what it means to play out the various roles of husband, father, son, brother, colleague and neighbour, Solar Bones offers a sharp, acerbic and often very funny response to contemporary Irish masculinity. Its account of the relationship between Marcus and Mairead is a particularly piercing and affecting portrayal of contemporary marriage, with its necessary inter-webbings and defended privacies; its desires, losses and rewards.

By times sharp and critical; by others, surprisingly tender and alert, Marcus’s narrative voice collates a lifetime’s worth of experience into an account that neither glamourises its consolations, nor reneges upon its failings and shortcomings.

The novel’s seamless structure gives it a beautifully fluid pace. An extremely enjoyable read, it is also poignant, moving and evocative. Although firmly committed to its particular Mayo setting, this is a novel of universal appeal: if you know Ireland, you will recognise this world; but if you don’t, you will still recognise Marcus Conway, a rich and (literally!) haunting character who brings a whole world to life.

About the book

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. Marcus Conway, a middle-aged engineer, turns up one afternoon at his kitchen table and considers the events that took him away and then brought him home again. Funny and strange, McCormack’s ambitious and other-worldly novel plays with form and defies convention. This profound new work is by one of Ireland’s most important contemporary novelists. A beautiful and haunting elegy, this story of order and chaos, love and loss captures how minor decisions ripple into waves and test our integrity every day.

About the author

Mike McCormack is an award-winning novelist and short story writer from Mayo. His previous work includes Getting it in the Head (1995), Crowe’s Requiem (1998), Notes from a Coma (2005), which was shortlisted for the Irish Book of the Year Award, and Forensic Songs (2012). In 1996 he was awarded the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature and in 2007 he was awarded a Civitella Ranieri Fellowship. In 2016 he won the Goldsmiths Prize and the Bord Gáis Energy Irish Book Award for best novel for Solar Bones. The novel was longlisted for the Republic of Consciousness Prize, and in March 2017 it was shortlisted for the Kerry Group Irish Novel Award. He lives in Galway. (from publisher)

Librarians’ comments

This is such a unique and unusual book that we feel the author deserves recognition. The novel is written in a single sentence which could have felt like a literary gimmick but instead comes across as really accomplished storytelling. In addition to his distinctive technique McCormack also brilliantly describes the area in which the book is set, making it a powerful element in the book.

A library staff pick for this readable, experimental novel set in and described as a hymn to small town Ireland.

The 2018 Judging Panel

The 2018 Judging Panel includes Vona Groarke, Xiaolu Guo, Nicky Harman, Dr Mpalive-Hangson Msiska, Courttia Newland  and non-voting Chair Hon. Eugene R. Sullivan.

• Watch Mike McCormack’s Acceptance Speech, 13th June 2018
• Press release
• Photographs
• 2018 Longlist 
• 2018 Shortlist
• Nominating Libraries