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A Ghost in the Throat

Audiobook
Nonfiction: Biography
Unabridged   7.75 hour(s)
Publication date: 08/31/2021


National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist
Longlisted for the 2021 Republic of Consciousness Prize
A Buzzfeed Recommended Summer Read
A Book Riot Best Book of 2022
An NPRBest Book of 2021

A Ghost in the Throat

Available from major retailers or BUY FROM AMAZON
Digital Download ISBN:9781696606790

Summary

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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Product Description

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.

Reviews/Praise

"A fascinating hybrid work in which the voices of two Irish female poets ring out across centuries. 'When we first met, I was a child, and she had been dead for centuries,' writes Ní Ghríofa in her first work of prose―and what a debut it is. Earning well-deserved accolades abroad, the book merges memoir, history, biography, autofiction, and literary analysis... Lyrical prose passages and moving introspection abound in this unique and beautiful book."―Kirkus Starred Review

Author Bio

Doireann Ní Ghríofa is a poet and essayist. In addition to A Ghost in the Throat, she is the author of six critically acclaimed books of poetry. Awards for her writing include a Lannan Literary Fellowship, the Ostana Prize, a Seamus Heaney Fellowship, and the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature.