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

of opening up a fresh newspaper, hearing it rattle and creak as it discloses itself, one of those experiences which properly begin the day or the afternoon as is the case now, turning it over and leafing through it
    starting at the back, the sports pages, to read the headline
    Hard Lessons in Latest Defeat
    as if this were the time and the place for a sermon
    which prompts me to close it again quickly, not wanting any homily at this hour of the day with the paper showing the date as
    November 2nd, the month of the Holy Souls already upon us, the year nearly gone so
    what happened to October
    come and gone in a flash, the clocks gone back for winter time only last week and
    the front-page stories telling that the world is going about its relentless business of rising up in splendour and falling down in ruins with wars still ongoing in foreign parts – Afghanistan and Iraq among others – as peace settlements are being attempted elsewhere – Israel and Palestine – while closer to home, the drama is in a lower key but real nonetheless – bed shortages in hospitals and public sector wage agreements under pressure – all good human stories no matter how they will pan out, you can feel that, the flesh and blood element twitching in them, while at the same time
    in the over-realm of international finance other, more abstract indices are rising and falling to their own havoc – share prices, interest rates, profit margins, solvency ratios – money upholding the necessary imbalances so that everything continues to move ever forward while on one of the inside pages there is
one year on
a long article with an illustrative graph and quotes outlining the causes and consequences of our recent economic collapse, a brief résumé of events that culminated on the night of September 29th, feast of the archangel Michael – the night the whole banking system almost collapsed and the country came within a hair's breadth of waking the following morning to empty bank accounts and
    for clarity's sake
    this article is illustrated by a sidebar which gives some indication of just how outsized the nation's financial folly was in the years leading up to the collapse, debt piling up till it ran to tens of billions, incredible figures for a small island economy, awe-inspiring magnitudes which shifted forever the horizons of what we thought ourselves liable for and which now, stacked on top of each other like this – all those zeroes, glossy and hard, so given to viral increase – appear like
    the indices and magnitudes of a new cosmology, the forces and velocities of some barren, inverse world – a negative realm that, over time, will suck the life out of us, that collapse which happened without offering any forewarning of itself, none that any of our prophets picked up on anyway as they were
    all apparently struck dumb and blind, robbed of all foresight.

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.