Prepare to 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.

Sharp as knives, mixing tongue-in-cheek bog Gothic with metaphysical flourishes and lashings of ultraviolence * * Guardian * *
McCormack is one of our bravest and most innovative writers - he shoots for the stars . . . and does not fall short -- Kevin Barry
Remarkable, even at the most extreme moments * * Irish Times * *
Funny, fantastical tales that trample on the toes of the twentieth century itself * * New York Times * *
McCormack's first collection of short stories ranges from the west of Ireland to New York to Purgatory . . . A helpless howl of protest that presages not only the end of the [twentieth] century but the end of civilisation itself * * Times Literary Supplement * *

Mike McCormack is an award-winning novelist and short story writer from Mayo. His previous work includes 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.