Crowe's Requiem

The first novel from the author of Booker-listed Solar Bones, Crowe’s Requiem is a dark fable that cemented Mike McCormack’s position as a stunning new voice in world literature.

McCormack’s myth-tinged debut novel gives us the unforgettable Crowe and his endlessly curious and self-mythologizing stories. Crowe is born in the remote village of Furnace in the West of Ireland and raised by his grandfather, a man of “madness and bullying love,” who teaches him grim lessons about existence. Entirely silent until his third birthday, Crowe becomes an observant and isolated teenager, eventually leaving Furnace for a large and bewildering city. There he meets a woman who will change his life and outlook, and also finds himself diagnosed with a rare and fatal aging disease. A profound, philosophical, and darkly funny meditation on childhood and the nature of life and death, Crowe’s Requiem challenges us with the power of stories to capture the pains, wonders, and mysteries of being a person in a “wrong world.”

Mike McCormack is an award-winning novelist and short story writer from the West of Ireland. His work includes Getting It in the Head, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year; Notes from a Coma, which was shortlisted for the Irish Book of the Year Award; Forensic Songs; and Solar Bones, which won the Goldsmiths Prize, the BGE Irish Novel of the Year Award, BGE Irish Book of the Year Award, and was nominated for the Man Booker Prize. He was also awarded the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature and a Civitella Ranieri Fellowship. He lives in Galway.