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Thin Places

Thin Places

Current price: $26.25
Publication Date: April 12th, 2022
Publisher:
Milkweed Editions
ISBN:
9781571311955
Pages:
280
Usually Ships in 1 to 5 Days

Memoir and folklore weave together in this haunting story of a childhood unfolding during the Troubles in Northern Ireland, capturing a burning desire to find balance and peace. Superbly beautiful, raw, and heartbreaking writing.

BJ Hegedus, Postalworks Silver Lake, Los Angeles, CA
April 2022 Indie Next List

Description

An Indie Next Selection for April 2022

An Indies Introduce Selection for Winter/Spring 2022

A Junior Library Guild Selection

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 n 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 n 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, n 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. N 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.

About the Author

Kerri ní Dochartaigh is the author of Thin Places. She has written for The Guardian, the Irish Times, the BBC, Winter Papers, and others. She is from the North West of Ireland but now lives in the middle, in an old railway cottage with her partner and dog.