Thin Places

Nonfiction

Thin Places

A Natural History of Healing and Home
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“Remarkable . . . I don’t think I’ve ever read a book as open-hearted as this.”—ROBERT MACFARLANE
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An Indies Introduce Selection for Winter/Spring 2022
An Indie Next Selection for April 2022
A Junior Library Guild Selection for Spring 2022

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.

Keywords: 
Northern Ireland, Derry, the Troubles, memoir, Nature, healing, poverty, catholic, Protestant
ISBN:
9781571311955
Publish Date: 
04/12/2022
Pages: 
280
Size: 
8.5 × 5.5 × 1 in
Weight: 
17.2 oz
Author

Kerri nÍ Dochartaigh's first book, Thin Places, was published in Spring 2022 in the US. It was an Indies Introduce selection for Winter/Spring 2022, an Indie Next selection for April 2022, and A Junior Library Guild selection for Spring 2022. Cacophony of Bone is her second book. She lives on the west coast of Ireland with her family.

Praise and Prizes

Blog Post

Milkweed Staff – 08/02/2021

Thin_Places_hc_3D.png by Kerri ní Dochartaigh When someone writes a book about anything the first thing they are often asked is:...