Said the Dead
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Said the Dead
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Narrated by:
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?
Critic reviews
“Said the Dead is one of those rare books where a reader encounters the writer and her characters at a dazzling and bewitching height, at a place where essence meets essence. A piercingly beautiful book that is wounding sometimes and consoling at others, the work, in the end, is life confirming: encompassed in the volume is the unparalleled expansiveness and depth of human minds and hearts.” —Yiyun Li, author of Things in Nature Merely Grow
“A haunting, visionary act of witness; this book will be read for decades to come.” —Anne Enright
“An entrancing book—lyrical and propulsive, it sounds out the echoes of history and finds voices and images that are moving and indelible. Reading this book is like being put under a spell.” —Seán Hewitt
“There’s magic in this one—a hauntingly beautiful and vivid and necessary book. —Kevin Barry
“Said the Dead is an audacious book that refuses to be anything but its own irreducible self. It is part narrative non-fiction, part poem, part novel, part work of eccentric and ecstatic scholarship. Like much of the best writing, though, it makes a mockery of the idea of genre categorisation. Doireann Ní Ghríofa remains a unique presence in Irish literature; as a reader, I would follow her into any darkness.” —Mark O'Connell, author of A Thread of Violence
“A mix of prose and nonfiction, at once a history book and a ghost story, anchored in the tales of the derelict Victorian mental hospital that looms over the skyline of Cork City in the south of Ireland.” ―Mastermind
“There is a fearlessness in Ní Ghríofa's work: in the subjects she turns her keen gaze on, but also in the very music she lets play in the lines.” —Paula Meehan, Irish poet and playwright
“Doireann Ní Ghríofa goes to a place where the veil thins and the worlds meet, and crosses over, and returns, again and again, with living stories of the dead. You can feel the bravery of these acts of psychic trespass, and their sincerity makes for a mysterious and beautiful and thoroughly absorbing book, which continues to reverberate long after you finish it.” —Lucy Caldwell, author of These Days
“A haunting, visionary act of witness; this book will be read for decades to come.” —Anne Enright
“An entrancing book—lyrical and propulsive, it sounds out the echoes of history and finds voices and images that are moving and indelible. Reading this book is like being put under a spell.” —Seán Hewitt
“There’s magic in this one—a hauntingly beautiful and vivid and necessary book. —Kevin Barry
“Said the Dead is an audacious book that refuses to be anything but its own irreducible self. It is part narrative non-fiction, part poem, part novel, part work of eccentric and ecstatic scholarship. Like much of the best writing, though, it makes a mockery of the idea of genre categorisation. Doireann Ní Ghríofa remains a unique presence in Irish literature; as a reader, I would follow her into any darkness.” —Mark O'Connell, author of A Thread of Violence
“A mix of prose and nonfiction, at once a history book and a ghost story, anchored in the tales of the derelict Victorian mental hospital that looms over the skyline of Cork City in the south of Ireland.” ―Mastermind
“There is a fearlessness in Ní Ghríofa's work: in the subjects she turns her keen gaze on, but also in the very music she lets play in the lines.” —Paula Meehan, Irish poet and playwright
“Doireann Ní Ghríofa goes to a place where the veil thins and the worlds meet, and crosses over, and returns, again and again, with living stories of the dead. You can feel the bravery of these acts of psychic trespass, and their sincerity makes for a mysterious and beautiful and thoroughly absorbing book, which continues to reverberate long after you finish it.” —Lucy Caldwell, author of These Days
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