A Ghost in the Throat (ebook)

Description

An PostIrish Book Awards Nonfiction Book of the Year AGuardianBest Book of 2020 Shortlisted for the 2021 Rathbones Folio Prize Shortlisted for the 2021 Republic of Consciousness Prize Winner of the James Tait Black Biography Prize ANew York TimesNew & Noteworthy Title Longlisted for the 2021 Gordon Burn Prize A Buzzfeed Recommended Summer ReadWhen we first met, I was a child, and she had been dead for centuries.I am eleven, a dark-haired child given to staring out window Her voice makes it 1773, a fine day in May, and puts English soldiers crouching in ambush; I add ditch-water to drench their knees. Their muskets point towards a young man who is falling from his saddle in slow, slow motion. A woman hurries in and kneels over him, her voice rising in an antique formula of breath and syllable the teacher calls a caoineadh, a keen to lament the dead.In the eighteenth century, on discovering her husband has been murdered, an Irish noblewoman drinks handfuls of his blood and composes an extraordinary lament that reaches across centuries to the young Doireann N Ghrofa, whose fascination with it is later rekindled when she narrowly avoids fatal tragedy in her own life and becomes obsessed with learning everything she can about the poem Peter Levi has famously called the greatest poem written in either Ireland or Britain during its era. A kaleidoscopic blend of memoir, autofiction, and literary studies,A Ghost in the Throatmoves fluidly between past and present, quest and elegy, poetry and the people who make it.Praise forA Ghost in the ThroatHistory mutes women; it also depends on them. This paradox is at the heart of aA Ghost in the Throat, an extraordinary literary memoir that finds life in buried spaces Feminist and feminine,A Ghost in the Throatgives defiant voice to hushed womanhood, in all of its pain and glory. Her images incandescent and brutal, N Ghrofa writes about the omens represented by starlings and about unearthed fragments of teacups, but also about caesarean scars, bleeding hangnails, and the consuming fire of her husbands touch A Ghost in the Throatis an achingly gorgeous literary exploration that establishes a sisterhood across generations.Foreword Reviews(starred review)One of the best books of this dreadful year 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 When you write like this there is almost nothing a writer cannot get away with.Sunday TimesPast versus present, blood versus milk, birth versus death, the Irish language versus the English: dichotomies abound, but the questions of womens lived experiences and who history remembers link them all.Paris ReviewA book like this comes along once every few years and obliterates every clear definition of genre and form. I mean no exaggeration here:A Ghost in the Throatis astounding and utterly fresh.Irish IndependentWith luminous language and candid details, this book shimmers with honesty and scholarship. A truly original read.Sunday IndependentWorking from Eibhln Dubhs famous poem, Caoineadh Airt U Laoghaire, and her own research, the author manages to get closer to this historic woman than any other person has ever done before Her account is so vivid that we are almost there, with the pregnant Eibhln Dubh on horseback, when she comes upon the body of her murdered husband and is so overcome with grief that she scoops up his blood and drinks it.Clodagh Finn