Very Old Bones

Riding on the melody of its language and the power of its story, Very Old Bones is a climatic work in the Albany Cycle from the Pultizer Prize-winning author of Ironweed

It is 1958 and the Phelan clan has gathered to hear Peter Phelan's will. Peter was an artist whose paintings about members of the family have given him belated critical recognition. The paintings illuminate the lives of his brother Francis (the exiled hero of Ironweed), and a family ancestor, Malachi McIlhenny, a true madman beset by demons, and determined to send them back to hell.

Orson Purcell, bastard son of Peter, encounters his first true solace through this obsessive and close-knit family he has never quite entered. It is through Orson's modern eye that we see the tragedies, obsessions, and clandestine joys of the singular Phelan family.



William Kennedy’s Albany Cycle of novels reflect what he once described as the fusion of his imagination with a single place. A native and longtime resident of Albany, New York, his work moves from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, chronicling family life, the city’s netherworld, and its spheres of power—financial, ethnic, political—often among the Irish-Americans who dominated the city in this period. The novels in his cycle include, Legs, Billy Phelan’s Greatest Game, Ironweed, Quinn’s Book, Very Old Bones, The Flaming Corsage, and Roscoe.