Said the Dead

From the author of the extraordinary, genre-bending, award-winning A Ghost in the Throat comes a stunning new prose work that again bends the limits of time, space and genre.

In November 1896, a young doctor named Lucia Strangman walks through the door of a lunatic asylum, where she will devote many years to recording her patients’ lives in a series of thick casebooks. More than a century later, a stranger finds these crumbling volumes and devotes her own years to discovering what they reveal of human suffering and healing, of care and harm, of trauma, dread, love, and joy.

Said the Dead follows this stranger—a reader—as she becomes acquainted with Lucia, and the female patients Lucia treats, by way of archived casebooks and clues hidden in the landscape of the asylum grounds (now remade into residential apartments), by way of a pandemic, and by way of a spectral visitor knocking on the door at night. What emerges is an astonishing act of empathy across time, in which past and present are both given voice—and both ask the same question: where might death and sanity reside?