PERHAPS A GIFT VOUCHER FOR MUM?: MOTHER'S DAY
Mike McCormack is an award-winning novelist and short story writer from Mayo. His previous work includes Getting it in the Head (1996), Notes from a Coma (2005), which was shortlisted for BGE Irish Novel of the Year, and Forensic Songs (2012). In 1996 he was awarded the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature for Getting it in the Head and in 2007 he was awarded a Civitella Ranieri Fellowship. In 2016, Solar Bones won the Goldsmiths Prize and was BGE Irish Book of the Year, and in 2017 was longlisted for the Man Booker prize.
This Plague of Souls is written in perfectly-pitched cadences. It captures with exquisite care a man ambushed by loss and fear, by hovering forces that are mysterious and otherworldly and beyond his control. It further establishes Mike McCormack as one of the best novelists writing now -- COLM TÓIBÍN This is the reason Mike McCormack is one of Ireland's best-loved novelists; he is the most modestly brilliant writer we have. His delicate abstractions are woven from the ordinary and domestic - both metaphysical and moving, McCormack's work asks the big questions about our small lives -- ANNE ENRIGHT A sombre tale shot through with glints of dark humour, in which the sins of the past at once haunt and illuminate the present. A compelling read -- JOHN BANVILLE This is a darkly marvellous novel: at once intimate, domestic and poignant, then speculative, hard-boiled and wild. That McCormack can be so convincing, so skilled in both registers is remarkable. That he can do it concurrently is genius -- LISA McINERNEY It was deliciously sinister and reminded me that nobody captures the cold beauty and cruelty of the world like Mike; I just know I'm going to be chewing it over in my mind for weeks -- SARA BAUME Mike McCormack's fiction has always had a philosophical bent, and none more so than in This Plague of Souls. In Nealon, we're given access to the mind of a man minutely attuned to every movement and vibration of his own consciousness, a man who is psychologically astute but receptive, too, to the hidden rhythms and frequencies of reality. There is a beautiful surreal feel to this novel, with its limbo landscape and night-time drives, but it is Nealon's meditation on family and fatherhood - and what the loss of those might mean - that will linger long in the reader afterwards -- MARY COSTELLO Praise for Mike McCormack and Solar Bones: McCormack has always been among the most adventurous and ambitious Irish writers -- COLM TÓIBÍN Pure enchantment from an otherworldly talent, I admired the hell out of this book -- ELEANOR CATTON Wonderfully original, distinctively contemporary . . . delivered in lucid, lyrical prose * * New York Times * * Unabashedly macabre . . . [McCormack's] clever ideas and fluid, gracefully morbid style are all his own * * GQ * *
