Thin_Places_hc_3D.png by Kerri ní Dochartaigh When someone writes a book about anything the first thing they are often asked is:...
Thin Places
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
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Praise and Prizes
“How does a person contend with coming from a place where suffering is part of its legacy? . . . It takes ní Dochartaigh many years to find her way back to the most important place of all: herself. Whether she’s meditating on moths or birds or the vivid colors of her home country, it’s her own perspective on the world around her that grounds her, soothes her, and offers solace.”
Michele Filgate
Boston Globe
“Luminous . . . For the author, who has suffered from alcoholism, depression, and suicidal ideation, the wild places surrounding her hometown help release her anxieties and bring her unparalleled peace. They have become her thin places. A beautifully written tribute to the healing power of nature.”
Kirkus Reviews
Starred Review
“In writing that’s ethereal and elliptical, [Dochartaigh] laments Ireland’s collective ‘loss of connection with the natural world’ and cleverly uses this ‘unwilding’ as a warning about the threat of extinction faced by indigenous flora and fauna, and also as a lens through which to look at the toll of oppression and violence on humanity . . . By turns subtle and urgent, this offers a powerful and complex portrait of a land and its people.”
Publishers Weekly
“‘Where does the past cease?’ ní Dochartaigh writes on the eve of Brexit in this deeply personal memoir that takes place amid a resurgence of division, violence, and uncertainty in Northern Ireland . . . Ní Dochartaigh’s unique writing moves between a personal journey of healing, the fragility and importance of the environment, and a powerful call for peace.”
Booklist
“This raw and affecting work confronts a complicated inheritance with both grief and hope . . . With grace and a keen sense of history and the natural world, Thin Places pays complicated tribute to a troubled place and time.”
Foreword Reviews
“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
“A beautiful and harrowing book about trauma, the potential to heal and the subtle magic of the wild. Kerri ní Dochartaigh offers us a fragile kind of redemption, full of truth and solace.”
Katherine May, author of Wintering
“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
“Luminous and achingly honest . . . The memoir’s evocative style is riveting, layering images of the natural places where the author finds solace with the urban spaces where she lives most of her life . . . What Thin Places ultimately leaves us with is the courage to speak the unspeakable, even if our voices shake.”
Gretchen Lida
Washington Independent Review of Books
“Ní Dochartaigh’s connection to the natural world [rises] every time her personal world seems about to sink. And it’s in these moments where the writing is at its most revelatory.”
Christa Laib
The Adroit Journal
“Dochartaigh takes great solace in nature, and much of the book is a meditation on the beautiful landscapes and flora and fauna that surround her. . . . Passionate, moving and beautifully written, this is a remarkable account of trauma and ways to acknowledge and overcome it.”
Sunday Times (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 powerful, bracing memoir that asks what happens when a child grows up in a city that isn’t safe . . . This is a book that will make you see the world differently.”
Irish Times
“Reflective memoir and folkloric tales weave together in this haunting evocative story of a childhood unfolding during the Troubles in Northern Ireland. Prose that reads, at times, more like poetry captures the burning desire to find balance and peace within the heart and soul of an ancient land and its modern inhabitants. Superbly beautiful, raw, heartbreaking writing that takes its place among the stars.”—BJ Hegedus
BJ Hegedus
Postalworks Silver Lake
“Moving effortlessly between the generational violence of the Troubles and the redemptive solace of the Irish landscape, Thin Places is at once a searing meditation on trauma and healing, a wild celebration of nature, and a wise reckoning with the complicated legacies of history, identity, and language. It is a beautiful and haunting memoir; it sings its way into your blood and your bones, takes you by the hand, and leads you across arbitrary borders to the gaps in our world. It leaves you changed, scoured clean, and ultimately, hopeful for the future.”
Rebecca Speas
One More Page Books
“An absolute gem of a book. Part biography and part natural history, it’s wonderfully told, giving one a palpable sense of place as well as the history of Ireland through a prism of the natural world. Fans of Robert Macfarlane and Aimee Nezhukumatathil will be right at home.”
Cody Morrison
Square Books
“Heady, bright and difficult to pin down. It is also redemptive. The Irish word for hope, we are told, is dòchas or dòigh, which holds, within its roots, glimmers of dóighiúil, the word for giving. Ní Dochartaigh takes that hope and gives it to us all.”
Big Issue
“What was Kerri ní Dochartaigh’s burden as a child—to exist in ‘the gaps between’ the Catholic and Protestant communities in Northern Ireland—has become her gift as a writer. She is sensitive to the legacies of loss and trauma and highly attuned to the gifts of the natural world and the possibilities of place. This is a special, beautiful, many-faceted book.”
Amy Liptrot, author of The Outrun
“An eloquent, moving work of politics, geography and the self. Full of wisdom and deeply engaging.”
Sinéad Gleeson, author of Constellations
“It seems as if everything about life is contained within the covers of this astonishing book: politics, history, nature, language and of course, love. A profound and moving work of art. This is a really special book—certainly, I’ve never read one quite like it.”
Christine Dwyer Hickey, author of The Narrow Land
“In Thin Places, Dochartaigh teaches as much as she muses, blurring the line between environmental nonfiction... and elegant memoir.”
Terrain.org
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