A Ghost in the Throat
Books | Biography & Autobiography / Personal Memoirs
4.1
Doireann Ní Ghríofa
An Post Irish Book Awards Nonfiction Book of the Year • A Guardian Best Book of 2020 • Shortlisted for the 2021 Rathbones Folio Prize • Longlisted for the 2021 Republic of Consciousness Prize • Winner of the James Tait Black Biography Prize • A New York Times New & Noteworthy Title • Longlisted for the 2021 Gordon Burn Prize • A Buzzfeed Recommended Summer Read • A Publishers Weekly Best Book of 2021 • A Book Riot Best Book of 2022 • An NPR Best Book of 2021 • A Chicago Public Library Best Book of 2021 • A Globe and Mail Book of the Year • A Winnipeg Free Press Top Read of 2021 • An Entropy Magazine Best of the Year • A LitHub Best Book of 2021 • A New York Times Critics' Top Book of 2021 • A National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist When we first met, I was a child, and she had been dead for centuries. On discovering her murdered husband’s body, an eighteenth-century Irish noblewoman drinks handfuls of his blood and composes an extraordinary lament. Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill’s poem travels through the centuries, finding its way to a new mother who has narrowly avoided her own fatal tragedy. When she realizes that the literature dedicated to the poem reduces Eibhlín Dubh’s life to flimsy sketches, she wants more: the details of the poet’s girlhood and old age; her unique rages, joys, sorrows, and desires; the shape of her days and site of her final place of rest. What follows is an adventure in which Doireann Ní Ghríofa sets out to discover Eibhlín Dubh’s erased life—and in doing so, discovers her own. Moving fluidly between past and present, quest and elegy, poetry and those who make it, A Ghost in the Throat is a shapeshifting book: a record of literary obsession; a narrative about the erasure of a people, of a language, of women; a meditation on motherhood and on translation; and an unforgettable story about finding your voice by freeing another’s.
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Author
Doireann Ní Ghríofa
Pages
185
Publisher
Biblioasis
Published Date
2021-05-27
ISBN
177196412X 9781771964128
Community ReviewsSee all
"I admire this in its intense, ferocious, yet delicate treatment of all elements in this book. I can see its mastery, its love radiating and bordering on obsession, madness. The author is very skilled, this book seeming vulnerable, and it feels laid bare in a way that is veiled and highly curated. And maybe that’s one of the sticking points for me that keeps me from raving about this. Maybe it’s vulnerable in a way and about a subject matter I either don’t identify with or have moved past in that way that all parents somehow have amnesia of those early, surreal years. The insistence of being a female text, this insistence felt powerful, feminist, in its urge, yet also seeming lost in another woman’s grief for her lost love and her own temporary loss of herself in motherhood and domestic work seemed like mutually exclusive sides of a coin. I may be pondering over this one for a while, trying to balance the equation of this book with my own understanding. Still, I give high praise to this author in her vulnerability and lyricism."
C
CaitVD
"This book is one I will definitely be revisiting in a few years. Its given me such a profound perspective I haven't yet gotten too as a woman in my early twenties. The language discussions are incredible. I've learned so so so much from this read and I am grateful. "
Shae Groat
"Nice weaving of scholarship and personal life. Life following art and the past in a way. A little long towards the end and sometimes hard to follow. Overall a good read, reminds me of the book If Women Rose Rooted."
Jessica A