 Recorded books and R.B. Digital present, Solar Bones by Mike McCormack, narrated by Tim Gerrard Reynolds. The bell, the bell as, hearing the bell as, hearing the bell as standing here, the bell being heard standing here, hearing it ring out through the gray light of this morning, noon or night, God knows, this gray day standing here and listening to this bell in the middle of the day, the middle of the day bell, the angelus bell in the middle of the day, ringing out through the gray light to here, standing in the kitchen, hearing this bell snag my heart and draw the whole world into being here, pale and breathless after coming a long way to stand in this kitchen, confused, no doubt about that. But hearing the bell from the village church a mile away as the crow flies across the street from the garden station, beneath the giant sycamore trees which tower over it and in which a colony of rooks have made their nests, so many and so noisy that sometimes in spring when they are nesting their clamour fills the church and exhausted now, so quickly that sprint to the church and the bell, yes, they are the real thing, the real bells, not a transmission or a broadcast, because there's no mistaking the fuller depth and resonance of the sound carried towards me across the length and breath of this day and which, even at this distance, reverberates in my chest, a systolic thump from the other side of this parish, which lies on the edge of this known world with sheafry and mule ray to the south and the open expanse of clue bay to the north, the angelous bell ringing out over its villages and townlands, over the fields and hills and bogs in between, six chimes of three across a minute and a half, a summons struck on the lip of the void which gathers this parish together through all its primary and secondary roads with all its schools and football pitches, all its bridges and graveyards, all its shops and pubs, the builder's yard and health clinic, the community centre, the water treatment plant and the handball alley, the made world with all the focal points around which a parish like this gathers itself, as surely as the world itself did at the beginning of time, through mountains, rivers and lakes, when it gathered in these parts around the Bonoan River, which rises in the Lacta Hills and flows north towards the sea, carving out that flood plain to which all roads, primary and secondary, follow the contours of the landscape, make their way and in the middle of which stands the village of Lewisburg, from which the angelous bell is ringing, drawing up the world again, mountains, rivers and lakes, acres, roots and perches, animal, mineral, vegetable, covenant, cross and crown, the given world and with all its history to brace myself while standing here in the kitchen, of this house I've lived in for nearly twenty-five years and raised a family, this house outside the village of Lewisburg and the county of Mayo on the west coast of Ireland, the village in which I can trace my seed and breed back to a time when it was nothing more than a ramshackle river crossing of a few smoky homesteads, clustered around a forge and a log bridge, a sodden stone hamlet not yet gathered to a proper plan nor licensed to hold a fair. My line, traceable to the gloomy prehistory, in which a tenacious clan of farmers and fishermen kept their grip on a small patch of land, through hail and gale, hell and high water. Sample complete, ready to continue?