Crowe's Requiem

Originally published in 1998, the first novel from the author of Booker-listed Solar Bones, Crowe's Requiem, is an eerie, fable-like work that confirmed Mike McCormack as a stunning new voice in world literature.

Crowe's Requiem tells the story of John Crowe, a young man born into a village without any apparent history or contact with the outside world. As the book begins, Crowe is only 20 but dying of progeria, a rare aging disease. Like an old man, he looks back upon his life and tries to invest the past with some meaning. Coming under the tutelage of his mad, beloved grandfather, Crowe is introduced to an existence he feels compelled to understand but is doomed forever to find elusive and mystifying. Breaking free of the old man's spell - drifting through the city hoping to complete his education - he embarks on a sudden, erotic affair with Marian, a young woman with a broken claim to divinity. Unable to see himself except through a prison of fictions, Crowe's life begins to escape him. Love story and gothic fairy tale, teeming with ghosts, sorcerors and vagrants, Crowe's Requiem is an eerie and treacherous meditation on the nature of storytelling by one of Ireland's finest writers.