Thin Places
-
- 8,99 €
-
- 8,99 €
Publisher Description
SHORTLISTED FOR THE WAINWRIGHT PRIZE FOR NATURE WRITING – HIGHLY COMMENDED
‘Remarkable’ Robert Macfarlane
‘Beautiful’ Amy Liptrot
‘Powerful, unflinching . . . Part hymn to nature, part Troubles memoir’ Guardian
Kerri ní Dochartaigh was born in Derry at the very height of the Troubles. One parent was Catholic, the other Protestant. In the space of a year Kerri’s family were forced out of two homes and when she was eleven a homemade petrol bomb was thrown through her bedroom window. For families like hers, terror was in the very fabric of the city.
In Thin Places, Kerri explores how nature kept her sane and helped her heal, and how we are again allowing our borders to become hard and terror to creep back in. Kerri asks us to reclaim and rejoice in our landscape, and to remember that the land we fight over is much more than lines on a map.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Part memoir, part ode to nature, Thin Places is a moving account of its author’s Troubles-era upbringing. Kerri ní Dochartaigh begins this striking read in her present, as she contemplates the renewed—and unsettling—focus on the Irish border in the wake of 2016’s Brexit vote. The reasons for her (and others’) acute anxiety around that dividing line quickly become clear as ní Dochartaigh takes us back to her past. Her childhood was spent in Derry, where she grew up the daughter of a Catholic mother and Protestant father, and where she witnessed horrifying violence. Thin Places is a story of how it shattered her—and explores ní Dochartaigh’s attempts to numb, escape and outrun the subsequent trauma. But it is also a love letter to nature, which has always served as a constant lifeline. The magic of Thin Places lies in ní Dochartaigh’s ability to describe it in as equally visceral, vivid detail as the shocking events of her younger life. This is, at times, a difficult, desperate read, but it is also one that’s full of strength and hope.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this nimble debut, Dochartaigh reflects on moving back to her native Ireland and the ways borders—constructed and natural, visible and unseen—shape life. Born in Derry in Northern Ireland during the Troubles in a divided household (her mother was Catholic, her father Protestant), the author vowed never to return after she moved "across the water" in her 20s in the mid-aughts. Yet 15 years later, Dochartaigh returned to find a nation fractured by Brexit (Derry, she writes, voted to remain). While reckoning with the unstable political landscape around her, Dochartaigh contends with another terrain: the "thin places" of refuge that she often finds in nature,where, according to Celtic mythology, heaven and earth are closer than usual. In writing that's ethereal and elliptical, she laments Ireland's collective "loss of connection with the natural world" and cleverly uses this "unwilding" as a warning about the threat of extinction faced by indigenous flora and fauna, and also as a lens through which to look at the toll of oppression and violence on humanity ("The echoes of the Troubles in Ireland have been, are being and will continue to be a coal-black crow that covers us with its wings"). By turns subtle and urgent, this offers a powerful and complex portrait of a land and its people.
