A Ghost in the Throat

A Ghost in the Throat

Doireann Ní Ghríofa

#335 of 3,809 books · #147 in Biography & Memoir

Won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Biography (2020). Also shortlisted or longlisted for 1 other award.

From the award-winning author of A Ghost in the Throat comes a time-traversing, form-defying, genre-morphing story of a reader unraveling the legacies of a fabled asylum and the women who haunt its halls. In Cork, Ireland, a derelict Victorian mental hospital is being converted into modern apartments. One passerby has always flinched as she nears the place. In another time, she might have found herself held within those walls. She notices a sign, the first of many. Guided by an irresistible impulse, she follows them. FOR SALE. The letter L, broken free from a pane of stained glass. Whispers from the river. She trespasses, steals, absconds from the routines of her life—mother, spouse, daughter—as she hears a chorus of insistent voices. They murmur from archives, old casebooks that recorded their progress and failures—no change. They slip through stairwells and walls. They are the women who knew this place best, and with them—with one in particular—she feels a connection. She is drawn out; she knocks on a door in the night. Will this investigation, this journey, this haunting, take her too far into the past or will it bring her to a new understanding of what she might yet make of the future? A work of intense attention and tenderness, Doireann Ní Ghríofa's Said the Dead breaks boundaries between past and present, the imagined and real, history and fiction, to make something new and lasting. An investigation into the dangers of knowing our selves and the past, it is an experience like no other—a ghost story and a reclamation.