Mike McCormack

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 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.

Solar Bones

It is All Souls Day, and the spirit of Marcus Conway sits at his kitchen table and remembers. He recalls his life in rural Ireland: as a boy and man, father, husband, citizen. Childhood memories of his father's deftness with machines turn to his own work as a civil engineer. As Conway's thoughts go outward, he stares down through the linked circumstances that combined to brought him into this single moment, and all the terror and gratitude that existence inspires.

A U.S. release of a popular novel by the author of the New York Times Notable Book of the Year, Getting It in the Head, follows a Romanian orphan's decision to volunteer for a deep-coma experiment during which his medical progress is posted on the Internet, rendering him an international celebrity. Original.

Notes from a Coma

Dag der zielen

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.

Originally published in 1998, the first novel from the author of Booker-listed Solar Bones, Crowe's Requiem, is an eerie, fable-like work that confirmed Mike McCormack as a stunning new voice in world literature. McCormack’s myth-tinged debut novel gives us the unforgettable Crowe and his endlessly curious and self-mythologizing stories. Crowe is born in the remote village of Furnace in the West of Ireland and raised by his grandfather, a man of “madness and bullying love,” who teaches him grim lessons about existence. Entirely silent until his third birthday, Crowe becomes an observant and isolated teenager, eventually leaving Furnace for university in a “wrong-footed” and bewildering city. There he meets a woman who will change his life and outlook, but a diagnosis with a rare and fatal aging disease means that his time with her will be cut tragically short. A profound, philosophical, and darkly funny meditation on childhood, aging, and the nature of life and death, Crowe’s Requiem challenges us with the powers and limits of stories to capture the pains, wonders, and mysteries of being a person in a “wrong world.”

Crowe's Requiem

why these bleak thoughts today, the whole world in shadow, everything undercut and suspended in its own delirium Marcus Conway has come home to his kitchen in Louisburgh, Co. Mayo,. Everything seems normal, yet he is haunted by the feeling that nothing is quite right. Poring obsessively over the details of his relationships, his world and his work as an engineer brings him closer to an understanding of how the things and people he loves have come together, and how they have and must inevitably come apart. Winner of the International Dublin Literary Award 2018, Solar Bones is Mike McCormack's multi-award-winning elegy to the merits of an ordinary life. This adaptation was first presented at the Kilkenny Arts Festival, and subsequently at the Abbey Theatre. The production won Best Actor for Stanley Townsend and Best Director for Lynne Parker at the Irish Times Theatre Awards.

The acclaimed debut from the author of Booker-listed Solar Bones is a dark, uncanny collection of stunning breadth and audacity. In this gothic, virtuoso debut collection, Mike McCormack dispenses nightmares both stylish and macabre. “A Is for Ax” offers an alphabetized account of the killing of a parent, while the title story tracks a chilling sibling rivalry. Others tell of a quiz on the road to Calvary, a door-to-door saleswoman trafficking in strange and menacing feats, and a self-mutilating artist pushing himself to the limit. These sly and dangerous stories, balanced on a knife’s edge between life and death, showcase a young writer’s mastery of wicked formal play.

Getting It in the Head: Stories

In his second collection of short stories, Mike McCormack joins head and heart in a series of tales which weave a fluid vision of a world morphing between the real and the hyperreal. Amid much hollow laughter a prisoner is drawn from his cell in the middle of the night to play a video game; two rural guards ponder the security threat posed by the only man in Ireland not to have written his memoirs; a child tries to offset his destiny as a serial killer by petitioning his father for a beating; a late night American cop show becomes a savage analysis of a faltering marriage in the west of Ireland; two men turn up at the door of a slacker to give him news of his death and recruit him to some mysterious surveillance mission; an older brother worries about the health of his younger sibling; the prodigal son returns to reveal the fear and hypocrisy which lies at the heart of his brothers life. In twelve stories McCormack's characters find themselves trying to hold onto their identities in a world where love is too often and too easily obscured.

Forensic Songs

De westkust van Ierland, 2 november 2008. De maand van Allerzielen is aangebroken; vader, echtgenoot en civiel ingenieur Marcus Conway zit aan de keukentafel, wachtend op zijn gezin. Terwijl in de verte de Angelusklok luidt overdenkt hij zijn leven. Zijn gedachten dwalen af naar zijn vrouw en kinderen, zijn jeugd, zijn werk, en naar de financiële crisis die Ierland en de rest van de wereld teistert. Dag der zielen, geschreven in slechts één zin, is een wonderschone, huiveringwekkende elegie, een verhaal over chaos en orde, over liefde en verlies, dat laat zien hoe kleine beslissingen grote gevolgen kunnen hebben.

Here we enter a world where the infatuation with death, ruin and destruction is total. Set in locations from New York to the west of Ireland, and to the nameless realms of the imagination, it is a world where beautiful but deranged children make lethal bombs, talented sculptors spend careers dismembering themselves in pursuit of their art, and wasters rise up with axes and turn into patricides. McCormack's celebrated debut collection is richly imaginative, bitterly funny, powerful and original.

Mike McCormack

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