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Thin Places: A Natural History of Healing and Home
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About This Book
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.
Reviews
"An evocative memoir about surviving the Troubles ..."
"It asks you to look at the sea and the sky and the trees anew; to wonder, when you are somewhere beautiful, whether you might be in a thin place, and what your responsibilities are to your location.It asks you to show compassion for people you think are difficult, to cultivate empathy, to try to understand the trauma that made them the way they are."
"A beautifully written tribute to the healing power of nature."
"By turns subtle and urgent, this offers a powerful and complex portrait of a land and its people."
"Her thin places are ancient burial sites, but also fields at the back of an estate or a built-up back garden with a cherry blossom tree in it ..."
"The book skirted on a thin place of understanding ní Dochartaigh's past and trying to grasp Ireland's traumatic history, shifting from personal anecdotes to extended sentences on the powers of nature."
"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."
"Passionate, moving and beautifully written, this is a remarkable account of trauma and ways to acknowledge and overcome it."
"I found myself by turns astonished and exhausted, enthralled by passages of sustained imaginative power, but often needing to put the book down so unrelenting is its heightened emotional pitch."
"The form allows ní Dochartaigh to explore her past, illuminating a path to where she is now ..."
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