This Plague of Souls

by Mike McCormack

Narrated by Dan Murphy

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Pub Date Jan 02 2024 | Archive Date Jan 11 2024

RB Media | Recorded Books

Mystery & Thrillers

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Description

The follow-up to Booker-listed literary sensation Solar Bones is a terse metaphysical thriller, named a most anticipated book of the year by The Guardian, The Irish Times, and The New Statesman.

Nealon returns from prison to his house in the West of Ireland to find it empty. No heat or light, no sign of his wife or child. It is as if the world has forgotten or erased him. Then he starts getting calls from a man who claims to know what's happened to his family-a man who'll tell Nealon all he needs to know in return for a single meeting.

In a hotel lobby, in the shadow of an unfolding terrorist attack, Nealon and the man embark on a conversation shot through with secrets and evasions, a verbal game of cat and mouse that leaps from Nealon's past and childhood to the motives driving a series of international crimes launched against "a world so wretched it can only be redeemed by an act of revenge." McCormack's existential noir is a terse and brooding exploration of the connections between rural Ireland and the globalized cruelties of the twenty-first century. It is also an incisive portrait of a young and struggling family, and a ruthless interrogation of what we owe to those nearest to us, and to the world at large.

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Advance Praise

The Times Literary Supplement Best Books of the Year 2023
The New Statesman Best Books of the Year 2023

“Terror, crime and sinister phone-calls — a magnificent Irish novel. For the most part, it reads like a thriller, shot through with a pervading atmosphere of precarity and uncertainty . . . a beautifully written collision of mystery and metaphysics.” ―The Telegraph

“McCormack’s prose is quite simply the best around, his sentences a joy, clear and precise, as uncluttered as the west of Ireland landscape they describe.” —Irish Examiner

“McCormack is a singular talent, lucid sentences locking into an eerie and unforgettable edifice. It has brutal physicality and arch metaphysics.” —The Scotsman

“McCormack’s language is evocative, perfectly suited to the noirish atmosphere he builds throughout the book . . . As in Solar Bones, McCormack displays his gift for describing landscapes and situations that might seem unlovely, but for the fact that they are loved by the author’s observing eye . . . This is a strange novel, sinister yet hopeful, a descent into darkness that somehow manages to rise into a ringing light.” —The Guardian

“A world of chaos and instability, with a troubled multi-dimensional character at its centre and an exquisitely rendered rural Ireland of beauty and darkness as the backdrop. McCormack is a cryptic, elliptical writer, forensic in his plotting and canny at teasing his readers.” —Financial Times

“Operating in a minor key, nudging us coyly towards an eerily personal apocalypse, the new book creates an utterly distinctive, utterly contemporary mood.” —The Irish Times

“McCormack's previous novel, Solar Bones, was robbed when it only made the longlist for the Booker Prize in 2017. Centred on the everyman psyche of an Irish engineer, it had a poignant twist I'm not about to spoil here - but if you've read it, let me say now that the trick he pulled in that book has nothing on the high-jinks afoot here . . . It's all very slippery and endlessly suggestive, as the circular wandering gives way to dystopian horror and a parable of complicity and guilt on an interconnected planet.” —Daily Mail