Just like Bloomsday encourages people to discover Ulysses, I hope All Soul's Day becomes an invitation for future readers to discover or revisit one of the finest works of 21st Century literature: Mike McCormack's Solar Bones from @TrampPress.

A book that will live forever. /1

My Dad hadn't read a single novel since secondary school - when he didn't finish Wuthering Heights. His experiences reading at school were so rough that he just felt fiction was beyond him. But I felt him so strongly in the character of Marcus Conway, so I gave him Solar Bones /2

I told him, "This book *is* you." I didn't know if he'd actually read it. It'd be odd not to have read a single novel in your life & then to read one that takes the form of a single, unstopping, riverine sentence that takes you from the kitchen table to the cosmos and back /3

But that's what happened. More than 40 years after my Dad finished school, Solar Bones turned him overnight into an avid fiction reader. When we skype now, we regularly chat about novels.

I loved Solar Bones already, but I'll always adore it for that /ends

One other take-away from this: formal innovation in literature needn't be brittle dissertation bait, accessible only to jaded PhD candidates.

You can be bold in form and still write work that's full of heart and magic (see recent revelatory books by @maxjohnporter, @DoireannNiG)

One thing you often hear writers say is "Readers are much smarter than the publishing world thinks." And it's true. I honestly think most readers will read any book on its own terms once they feel like they have a 'way in' - for my Dad, Solar Bones was a passport to a whole world

which mainstream publishing would automatically deem to be 'not for him.' Books like Solar Bones, Lanny, A Ghost in the Throat etc. are finding large readerships because the gatekeepers are wrong, experimentation need not be exclusive, literature as a creative searching lives on