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A Natural History of Healing and Home
by Kerri ní Dochartaigh
Both a celebration of the natural world and a memoir of one family's experience during the Troubles, Thin Places is a gorgeous braid of "two strands, one wondrous and elemental, the other violent and unsettling, sustained by vividly descriptive prose" (the Guardian).
Kerri ní Dochartaigh was born in Derry, on the border of the North and South of Ireland, at the very height of the Troubles. She was brought up on a council estate on the wrong side of town—although for her family, and many others, there was no right side. One parent was Catholic, the other was Protestant. In the space of one year, they were forced out of two homes. When she was eleven, a homemade bomb was thrown through her bedroom window. Terror was in the very fabric of the city, and for families like ní Dochartaigh's, the ones who fell between the cracks of identity, it seemed there was no escape.
In Thin Places, a luminous blend of memoir, history, and nature writing, ní Dochartaigh explores how nature kept her sane and helped her heal, how violence and poverty are never more than a stone's throw from beauty and hope, and how we are, once again, allowing our borders to become hard and terror to creep back in. Ní Dochartaigh asks us to reclaim our landscape through language and study, and remember that the land we fight over is much more than lines on a map. It will always be ours, but—at the same time—it never really was.
"In this nimble debut, Dochartaigh reflects on moving back to her native Ireland and the ways borders—constructed and natural, visible and unseen—shape life...By turns subtle and urgent, this offers a powerful and complex portrait of a land and its people." - Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"A luminous memoir...With raw emotion, [ní Dochartaigh] describes many of the harrowing experiences, including being driven out of their home when a bomb was thrown through the window, moving frequently to avoid threats, and the murder of a dear friend...A beautifully written tribute to the healing power of nature." - Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"Part hymn to nature, part Troubles memoir...the two strands, one wondrous and elemental, the other violent and unsettling, sustained by the vividly descriptive prose...Unflinching in its intensity...Thin Places is at heart a survivor's story located in the real and brutally Darwinian world of lived experience." - The Guardian (UK)
"Acutely personal...Wonderfully evocative...This heartfelt memoir, with its message on the saving grace of nature, may speak to an even wider audience than it first imagined." - Daily Mail (UK)
"A remarkable piece of writing. I don't think I've ever read a book as open-hearted as this. It resists easy pieties of nature as a healing force, but nevertheless charts a recovery which could never have been achieved without landscape, wild creatures and 'thin places.' It is also flocked with luminous details (moths, birds, feathers, skulls, moving water). Kerri's voice is utterly her own, rich and strange. I've folded down the corners of many pages, marking sentences and moments that glitter out at me. Wow." - Robert Macfarlane, author of Underland
This information about Thin Places was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Kerri ní Dochartaigh is the author of Thin Places. She has written for the Guardian, the Irish Times, the BBC, Winter Papers, and others. She is from the North West of Ireland but now lives in the middle, in an old railway cottage with her partner and dog.
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