Rencontre with Mike McCormack

Six years after the publication of his highly successful novel Solar Bones, winner of the CCI-Literature Ireland Prix de Traduction 2021, Mike McCormack returns with a masterful cross between a psychological thriller and poetic introspection. This Plague of Souls (2023) has been widely praised by the English-speaking press and is published in French translation by Grasset as La nuée des âmes in January 2025.

Released from jail, the protagonist Nealon returns to the family home but finds himself alone in an empty house. No light or heat, no sign of his wife or child, it’s as though the world has forgotten that he ever existed. Except, that is, for a persistent caller, a man who seems to know everything about Nealon’s life, his trouble with the law and, more importantly, what has happened to his family… In this novel, the writer uses all his talent as a storyteller to offer us an intimate and troubling tale with flashes of dark humour.