A Ghost in the Throat

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. Eibhl n Dubh N 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 Eibhl n 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 Ní Ghríofa sets out to discover Eibhl n 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.