There is a new book out there that not only won the Goldsmiths Prize and £10,000, but it was also shortlisted for Novel of the Year at the BGE Irish Book Awards. To cap it all, some believed it would have won the Booker Prize if it was eligible; it wasn’t as it was published in Ireland. What’s so remarkable about this one, I hear you ask? The book contains only 1 sentence.
To be more precise, Solar Bones by Mike McCormack is 207 pages long, but contains no chapters, capital letters, commas, full stops or speech marks, yet it lauded by all who read it.
The Guardian gushed: 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.
The New Statesman said: McCormack’s writing has a quality of attention that caused Blake Morrison, the chair of the judges, to proclaim this novel “a masterpiece”.
I haven’t read it so I can’t comment, but if we all wrote like this, why would we need editors? They must be quaking in their boots.
You can download a copy of Solar Bones here at Amazon UK
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