Do you love Irish writers? Join the IrishCentral Book Club each month as we introduce some of the best new Irish books and authors.
Welcome to July’s pick for the IrishCentral Monthly Book Club! Each month we will pick a new Irish book or a great book from an Irish author and celebrate the amazing ability of the Irish to tell a good story.
Before we announce this month’s book, thank you to all our readers who took part throughout June and who shared your thoughts on Sally Rooney’s “Conversations with Friends.” While the general theme from readers seemed to be that the book was “well-written,” some people “disliked the characters” while one ready said it made them “glad to be out of my 20s.”
Throughout July, we’ll be reading Mike McCormack’s “Solar Bones,” which recently took home the Dublin Literary Prize and is heralded as a full novel involving just one sentence.
Solar Bones is one of the best and most affecting books I've read in years, highly recc reading it if you've not already! https://t.co/zueYj9mqnx
— The Feelings Haver (@mmegannnolan) June 25, 2018
You can read more about “Solar Bones” and its Dublin Literary Prize here or read below to find out more about the book itself.
You can pick up your own copy at this link.
With a new book announcement on the first day of each month, stay with us throughout the month as we talk to the authors and give you a chance to discuss some great Irish works. The best way to stay in touch with us and other book club members is to join our dedicated Facebook group here, where you can leave your comments and questions or give us some more great Irish recommendations.
If you have any further comments, questions for the author or recommendations for a future IrishCentral Book of the Month, you can email us at books@irishcentral.com.
IrishCentral’s July Book of the Month: Solar Bones
Author: Mike McCormack
Publisher: Tramp Press (Ireland)/Soho Press (US)
Genre: Fiction
Synopsis: 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.
About the author: Mike McCormack, from Galway, Ireland, has published a collection of short stories, Getting It In The Head, and a novel, Crowe’s Requiem. In 1996, McCormack was awarded the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature. In 1998, Getting it in the Head was voted a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. A story from the collection, “The Terms,” was adapted into an award-winning short film.
You can purchase “Solar Bones” here.
Be sure to join the IrishCentral Book Club group here or to send us an email with questions at books@irishcentral.com.
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