Publisher's Synopsis
An Post Irish Book Awards Nonfiction Book of the Year A Guardian Best Book of 2020 Shortlisted for the 2021 Rathbones Folio Prize Longlisted for the 2021 Republic of Consciousness Prize Winner of the James Tait Black Biography Prize A New York Times New & Noteworthy Title Longlisted for the 2021 Gordon Burn Prize A Buzzfeed Recommended Summer Read A Publishers Weekly Best Book of 2021 A Book Riot Best Book of 2022 An NPR Best Book of 2021 A Chicago Public Library Best Book of 2021 A Globe and Mail Book of the Year A Winnipeg Free Press Top Read of 2021 An Entropy Magazine Best of the Year A LitHub Best Book of 2021 A New York Times Critics' Top Book of 2021 A National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist
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. Eibhlìn Dubh Nì 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 Eibhlìn 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 Ni´ Ghri´ofa sets out to discover Eibhlìn 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.
