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A Ghost in the Throat

A Ghost in the Throat

by Doireann Ní Ghríofa

Biblioasis ·2021 ·336 pages
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Near the Top
I Index
70/99
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98/99

Critics' Rating Index

Maybe Someday

41/99

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About This Book

A true original. In this stunningly unusual prose debut, Doireann Ni Ghriofa sculpts essay and autofiction to explore inner life and the deep connection felt between two writers centuries apart. In the 1700s, an Irish noblewoman, on discovering her husband has been murdered, drinks handfuls of his blood and composes an extraordinary poem. In the present day, a young mother narrowly avoids tragedy. On encountering the poem, she becomes obsessed with its parallels with her own life, and sets out to track down the rest of the story. A devastating and timeless tale about one woman freeing her voice by reaching into the past and finding another's.


Reviews

"it would in fact be hard to imagine another person who could match her consideration of the poem, the way she lives the verses and is emotionally impacted by their meaning ..."

Sarah Gilmartin· The Irish Times Read review ↗ Top of the Pile

"heated and alive ...This is not dusty scholarship but a work of passion."

Nina Maclaughlin· The New York Times Read review ↗ Top of the Pile

"there is a crucial aspect of Ní Ghríofa's experience that she marginalizes throughout the memoir, and that is the hidden heart of it: how she translated the 'Caoineadh.' Although at the back of the book she gives us the poem in Irish Gaelic, her exciting translation, and a list of references for further reading, I wanted much more ..."

Ange Mlinko· New York Review of Books Read review ↗ Near the Top

"Billed as a genre-busting blend of 'autofiction, essay, scholarship, sleuthing and literary translation', the book is an extraordinary feat of ventriloquism delivered in a lush, lyrical prose that dazzles readers from the get-go ..."

Bert Wright· The Times (UK) Read review ↗ Top of the Pile

"A fascinating hybrid work in which the voices of two Irish female poets ring out across centuries ..."

Kirkus Read review ↗ Top of the Pile

"a kaleidoscopic book of 'homemaking' that centers the intuitive knowledge of the body in order to learn to live—again, again, and again."

SHAZIA HAFIZ RAMJI· The Chicago Review of Books Read review ↗ Near the Top

"It recalls Nathalie Léger's brilliant and original Suite for Barbara Loden: a biography of the actress and director that becomes a tally of the obstacles in writing such a book, and an admission of the near-impossibility of biography itself ..."

Parul Sehgal· The New York Times Read review ↗ Top of the Pile

"This spectral, arresting and at times disorientating autofiction is, most simply, the story of an author and her muse."

Amelia Butler-Gallie· The Spectator (UK) Read review ↗ Top of the Pile

"As Doireann discovers and reveals how she sees herself in the poem and Eibhlín in herself, she leads the reader through an intensely beautiful reckoning."

Publishers Weekly Read review ↗ Top of the Pile

"This incandescent, uncategorisable prose debut is...many things—a reimagining of an 18th-century life that combines scholarship with imaginative verve; an account of obsession and a meditation on the limits of biography; a memoir of post-feminist motherhood ..."

Hephzibah Anderson· The Guardian Read review ↗ Top of the Pile

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