Solar Bones by Mike McCormack

This book, long listed for the Booker Prize, takes place in the course of an hour on All Souls’ Day, when the dead return to walk the Earth, and set in the stark, lovely landscape of County Mayo on Ireland’s west coast, it is a story told by a ghost of a man in one single running sentence. It is broken by commas and paragraph indentation, but never comes to a full stop. It could be a story being told on the stage.
Its narrator is the recently dead Marcus Conway, a civil engineer who is still concerned with scale and accuracy, mapping and surveying, but also with love for his wife Mairead and their children. Even illness and suffering can be rendered beautiful by close observation, by the tenderness of affection. Marcus’s life is an ordinary one in much the way that the life of Leopold Bloom, his literary predecessor, is ordinary. It is the vivid attention to detail is Joycean, which makes this novel resonate like an evening bell.