This Plague of Souls, Mike McCormack
This Plague of Souls, Mike McCormack
List: $12.99 | Sale: $9.10
Club: $6.49

This Plague of Souls

Author: Mike McCormack

Narrator: Dan Murphy

Unabridged: 4 hr 33 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Recorded Books

Published: 01/02/2024


Synopsis

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.

About Mike McCormack

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.


Reviews

Goodreads review by switterbug (Betsey) on December 18, 2023

As much as I am an enthusiastic contender for ambiguity in a story, I have to feel something organic and true from the center. THIS PLAUGUE OF SOULS seeps its message from the corners, but then quickly evaporates. The writer teased me relentlessly, but I’m not sure that he ultimately penetrated my l......more

Goodreads review by Claire on October 27, 2023

Well, that wasn't what I was expecting. Perhaps the first half, which felt like a different novel, one that felt familiar in an Irish rural novel kind of way, featuring a lonesome protagonist, Nealon, who has returned to the abandoned home and found it empty of his wife Olwyn and child Cuan, who had......more

Goodreads review by John on January 26, 2024

Ambiguity and tension….. Book Information "This Plague of Souls" by Mike McCormack is a 192-page “metaphysical thriller” published on January 2, 2024. The audio version is narrated by Dan Murphy and spans 4 hours and 33 minutes. Thank you to RB Media for providing me with an Advance Readers Copy for......more

Goodreads review by Janelle on December 20, 2023

Nealon has just been released from months in prison after the trial against him collapsed. He returns to an empty house, no sign of his wife and young son. Then he gets a phone call from a man who doesn’t give a name. While I liked the tense, mysterious atmosphere and found it hard to put down, it’s......more

Goodreads review by Paul on October 21, 2023

Nealon has always seen her as someone from the end of days, some pale functionary with a specific role to play in whatever way the darkness will come down. Among his visions of her is one where she is taking the sacrificial lead on some sort of cosmic altarpiece. This Plague of Souls is the "dark ce......more