RaveThe GuardianMike 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 and that novelists are not merely lit-fest fodder for the metropolitan middle classes ... Among its many structural and technical virtues, everything in the book is recalled, but none of it is monotonous ... The book is a hymn to modern small-town life, then, with its 'rites, rhythms and rituals / upholding the world like solar bones,' as well as an indictment of human greed and stupidity, and how places and cultures respond to the circumstances beyond their control and yet of their own making ... The magnificent song that is Solar Bones possesses such peculiar depth, such consonances and dissonances that it is a reminder that a writer of talent can seemingly take any place, any set of characters, any situation and create from them a total vision of the reality. This is a book about Mayo, Ireland, Europe, the world, the solar system, the universe.
