A Ghost In The Throat

Author: Doireann Ni Ghriofa

Publisher: Tramp Press

Available: 28th October 2021 in Paperback, eBook & Audiobook

Thank you to Helen Richardson of Helen Richardson PR and Tramp Press for my gifted copy and for having me on the blog tour for this book. My review is based on my experience of the book and any thoughts expressed here are solely mine alone.

Book Details

WINNER Book of the Year, the Irish Book Awards

WINNER Foyles Non-Fiction Book of the Year

WINNER James Tait Black Memorial Prize

SHORTLISTED Gordon Burn Prize

SHORTLISTED Rathbones Folio Prize

SHORTLISTED Republic of Consciousness Prize

LONGLISTED Desmond Elliott Prize

‘When we first met, I was a child, and she had been dead for centuries’

In the 1700s an Irish noblewoman, on discovering that her husband has been murdered, drinks handfuls of his blood and composes an extraordinary poem. Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill’s Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire was famously referred to by Peter Levi, then Professor of Poetry at Oxford University, as the ‘greatest poem written in these islands in the whole eighteenth century.’

In the present day, a young mother narrowly avoids tragedy. On encountering the poem, she becomes obsessed with its echoes in her own life and sets out to track down the rest of the poet’s story. Culminating in Doireann Ní Ghríofa’s own translation of the poem, A Ghost in the Throat is a devastating and timeless tale about one woman freeing her voice by reaching into the past to hear another’s

My Thoughts;

When my friend and fellow squadette Sue at Brown Flopsy’s Book Burrow (@brownflopsy) messaged us The SquadPod Collective (@squadpod3) and enthusiastically insisted that we all needed to read this book, I checked out the details and thought…ooooh Sue’s right this book does sound incredible! I added it immediately to my To Buy List and then as if the fates knew something I didn’t, I was sent an email asking if I wanted to be part of the blog tour for this very book. How could I resist! This book is indeed breath taking, sublimely beautiful and nearly impossible to review with sufficient addjectives to impart how astonishing a read it is or how much, I want you to read it too. Sue said it was unequalled and she was right!

Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill was a 17th century Irish poet, who poured her feelings of profound loss, grief and mourning of her murdered husband in the soulful, lyrical poem Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire (The Keen for Art O Laoghaire) copies of this incredible poem in both Irish and English are located at the back of the book and I found it germane to read the poem before I embarked on reading this book (and I would also suggest you read it again at the end of your journey with this book) as your comprehension of its themes and nuances, will transform after you’ve read this novel. This book is a song of women, sung in the past and the present, an investigation, a memoir both beautiful and brutal; a tapestry of prose, stitching elements together; pulling at the threads of different women’s lives to create discernible images and experiences, to enrich emotions to the point of visibility. It is truly stunning to read.

A harried mother of three is our narrator she has a lifelong fascination with this poem and as she reads it aloud, it almost become a living entity that weaves its evocations into her life and drives her to investigate the poem further and this exploration propels, motivates, and bolsters her. I loved being involved in her life’s journey, the truths, experiences of love, marriage and motherhood and the emotions that crash like waves on a beach, the ebullience, the consternation, the depletion, and the solace she gleans from the known certainty of her routine and how this links her to generations of women who before her, have trodden these familiar paths of womanhood and succinctly extrapolates the reality of being female, a wife, a mother, a crone. All through the book repeated phrase ‘this is a female text’ allowing the reader to assume, she too is included in this story and its female centric themes.

Over the period of the novel, you see our narrator move closer to the poet, especially when tribulations impact her own life and further compel her learn all she can about Nelly (the pet name given to the poet by family). Yet her discoveries are hampered by the socio-cultural traditions of the time, where the voices and stories of women were predominately oral not written and any that were written, have often been buried beneath the lives and words of men making finding tangible answers difficult.

This book is an ode to womanhood and the clever observation or sentiment that the point we’ve reached in our lives, colours how we see, what influences us and inspires what we read (doesn’t it just) is wonderful. This book is poetic, profound, pertinent, and utterly phenomenally perfect, it will forever be present in your heart as it now is in mine. It belongs on your bookshelf, I insist, and implore you to get a copy and I will go as far as to beg you to buy one, right now, today…. you will never have read such an book as this, and I’m not sure I will read anything quite like it ever again!

Happy Reading Bookophiles

About the Author:

DOIREANN NÍ GHRÍOFA is a bilingual writer whose books explore birth, death, desire, and domesticity. Doireann’s awards include a Lannan Literary Fellowship, a Seamus

Heaney Fellowship, the Ostana Prize and the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature. She is a member of Aosdána. A Ghost in the Throat is her prose debut.

Please do read some of the other reviews on this blog tour.