Excerpt from Solar Bones by Mike McCormack, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

as surely as
    the world itself did at the beginning of time, through
    mountains, rivers and lakes
    when it gathered in these parts around the Bunowen river which rises in the Lachta hills and flows north towards the sea, carving out that floodplain to which all roads, primary and secondary, following the contours of the landscape, make their way and in the middle of which stands
    the village of Louisburgh
    from which the Angelus bell is ringing, drawing up the world again
    mountains, rivers and lakes
    acres, roods and perches
    animal, mineral, vegetable
    covenant, cross and crown
    the given world with
    all its history to brace myself while
    standing here in the kitchen
    of this house
I've lived in for nearly twenty-five years and raised a family, this house outside the village of Louisburgh in the county of Mayo on the west coast of Ireland, the village in which I can trace my seed and breed back to a time when it was nothing more than a ramshackle river crossing of a few smoky homesteads clustered around a forge and a log bridge, a sod-and-stone hamlet not yet gathered to a proper plan nor licensed to hold a fair, my line traceable to the gloomy prehistory in which a tenacious clan of farmers and fishermen kept their grip on a small patch of land
    through hail and gale
    hell and high water
    men with bellies and short tempers, half of whom went to their graves with pains in their chests before they were sixty, good singers
many of them, all
    adding to the home place down the generations till it swelled to twenty acres, grazing and tillage, with access to open commonage on Carramore hill which overlooks the bay and
    this pain, this fucking pain tells me that
    to the best of my knowledge
    knowledge being the best of me, that
    that
    there is something strange about all this, some twitchy energy in the ether which has affected me from the moment those bells began to toll, something flitting through me, a giddiness drawing me
    through the house
    door by door
    room by room
    up and down the hall
    like a mad thing
    bedrooms, bathroom, sitting room and
    back again to the kitchen where
    Christ
    such a frantic burst
    Christ
    not so much a frantic burst as a rolling crease in the light, flowing
    from room to room only to find
    this house is empty
    not a soul anywhere
    because this is a weekday and my family are gone
    all gone
    the kids all away now and of course Mairead is at work and won't be back till after four so the house is mine till then, something that should gladden me as normally I would only be too happy to potter around on my own here, doing nothing, listening to the radio or reading the paper, but now the idea makes me uneasy, with four
hours stretching ahead of me till she returns,
    alone here for four hours
    four hours till she returns so

Excerpted from Solar Bones by Mike McCormack. Copyright © 2017 by Mike McCormack. Excerpted by permission of Soho Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.