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by Doireann Ní Ghríofa
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.
"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." ―Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"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." ―The Guardian
"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
This information about Said the Dead 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.
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.
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