Solar Bones is like nothing I’ve read, an experimental novel about love, engineering, and contaminated water that hits all three of its targets: heart, head, and guts. This book gushes blood, and McCormick’s wondrous feat is to chart its movements with an engineer’s precision and a poet’s ear. Solar Bones will draw comparisons to Ulysses, and certainly its fluid stream-of-conscious would do Joyce proud, but I was also reminded of another Irish novel, Roddy Doyle’s The Committments—or, at least, the soundtrack to its film adaptation—with its heavy concentration of blue-eyed soul. This is a rare and beautiful novel, and one I won’t soon forget.