Description
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Review Quotes: "Wildly imaginative . . . Ní Ghríofa's treatment of the patients and their textual remains is never less than sensitive . . . She is the one who pursues the dead, impossibly, out of the written record and into their hopes and regrets, dreams and extravagant desires. It is these that give this book its extraordinary formal and ethical force." --Lucy Sholes, Financial Times "A feat of literary alchemy . . . akin to Virginia Woolf's Orlando . . . If A Ghost in the Throat redrew the boundaries of the contemporary Irish memoir, Said the Dead stands apart as a work of postmodern necromancy. Nobody currently writing is pulling off sorcery like this. Nobody--not even Sebald--could make these dead speak so convincingly." --James Patterson, RTE "I have been telling everyone about Said the Dead . . . a remarkable engagement with the archive of a mental asylum in Cork--which sounds miserable but manages to be sublime. Reading it, I had the uncanny feeling that the book had been out there waiting for her to come along and write it." --Anne Enright, The Guardian "[An] astonishing prose debut . . . Said the Dead is a luminous and genre-defying exploration of the histories we risk losing when women are remembered only through the systems that contained them." --Katie Tobin, AnOther " Said the Dead might again defy definition but it does not disappoint. Deeply researched but also richly imagined . . . Ní Ghríofa's work is grounded in research but instead of academic distance she uninhibitedly inhabits the facts and her findings." --Martin Doyle, Irish Times "Gripping . . . Birth and death, past and present, real and imagined, Ní Ghríofa--who previously penned the An Post Irish Book of the Year-winning A Ghost in the Throat--weaves another captivating tapestry of contrasts." --The Irish Independent "A beguiling read." --Jackie Law, Bookmunch " A meticulous unearthing of a subterranean world--one defined by work, poverty, childbirth, and where one wrong step can result in institutionalisation." --Cold, Lexi Covalsen "In this stunning hybrid work, poet and essayist Ní Ghríofa interweaves historical biography with lyrical memoir to investigate the lives of women who were institutionalized at a now-defunct psychiatric facility in Cork... with incandescent prose, an inventive structure, and a haunting atmosphere in which both time and identity are permeable, this is not to be missed." --Publisher's Weekly (starred review) "A haunting, visionary act of witness; this book will be read for decades to come." --Anne Enright, author of The Wren, The Wren " Said the Dead is one of those rare books where a reader encounters the writer and her characters at a dazzling and bewitching height, at a place where essence meets essence. A piercingly beautiful book that is wounding sometimes and consoling at others, the work, in the end, is life confirming: encompassed in the volume is the unparalleled expansiveness and depth of human minds and hearts." --Yiyun Li, author of Things in Nature Merely Grow "Doireann Ní Ghríofa goes to a place where the veil thins and the worlds meet, and crosses over, and returns, again and again, with living stories of the dead. You can feel the bravery of these acts of psychic trespass, and their sincerity makes for a mysterious and beautiful and thoroughly absorbing book, which continues to reverberate long after you finish it." --Lucy Caldwell, author of These Days "An entrancing book--lyrical and propulsive, it sounds out the echoes of history and finds voices and images that are moving and indelible. Reading this book is like being put under a spell." --Seán Hewitt, author of Rapture's Road " Said the Dead is an audacious book that refuses to be anything but its own irreducible self. It is part narrative non-fiction, part poem, part novel, part work of eccentric and ecstatic scholarship. Like much of the best writing, though, it makes a mockery of the idea of genre categorisation. Doireann ní Ghríofa remains a unique presence in Irish literature; as a reader, I would follow her into any darkness." --Mark O'Connell, author of A Thread of Violence "There's magic in this one--a hauntingly beautiful and vivid and necessary book." --Kevin Barry, author of The Heart in Winter Biographical Note: Doireann Ní Ghríofa is a poet and an essayist. Her first prose work, A Ghost in the Throat, was a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist; the winner of the Irish Book Awards' Book of the Year, the Foyles Nonfiction Book of the Year, and the James Tait Black Prize; and a nominee for the Rathbones Folio Prize. It was named a best book of the year by The New York Times, NPR, The Guardian, The Observer (London), The Irish Times, and The Globe and Mail. Ní Ghríofa is also the author of numerous acclaimed books of poetry. She is the recipient of a Lannan Literary Fellowship, the Ostana Prize, a Seamus Heaney Fellowship, and the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature. Publisher Marketing: From the award-winning author of A Ghost in the Throat comes a time-traversing, form-defying, genre-morphing story of a reader unraveling the legacies of a fabled asylum and the women who haunt its halls. In Cork, Ireland, a derelict Victorian mental hospital is being converted into modern apartments. One passerby has always flinched as she nears the place. In another time, she might have found herself held within those walls. She notices a sign, the first of many. Guided by an irresistible impulse, she follows them. FOR SALE. The letter L, broken free from a pane of stained glass. Whispers from the river. She trespasses, steals, absconds from the routines of her life--mother, spouse, daughter--as she hears a chorus of insistent voices. They murmur from archives, old casebooks that recorded their progress and failures-- no change. They slip through stairwells and walls. They are the women who knew this place best, and with them--with one in particular--she feels a connection. She is drawn out; she knocks on a door in the night. Will this investigation, this journey, this haunting, take her too far into the past or will it bring her to a new understanding of what she might yet make of the future? A work of intense attention and tenderness, Doireann Ní Ghríofa's Said the Dead breaks boundaries between past and present, the imagined and real, history and fiction, to make something new and lasting. An investigation into the dangers of knowing our selves and the past, it is an experience like no other--a ghost story and a reclamation.Review Citations:
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Said the Dead
$34.80