Awards

• Long-listed for Wainwright Prize for Nature Writing 2023 (UK)

Overview

Two days after the Winter Solstice in 2019 Kerri and her partner M moved to a small, remote railway cottage in the heart of Ireland. They were looking for a home, somewhere to stay put. What followed was a year of many changes. The pandemic arrived and their isolated home became a place of enforced isolation. It was to be a year unlike any we had seen before. But the seasons still turned, the swallows came at their allotted time, the rhythms of the natural world went on unchecked. For Kerri there was to be one more change, a longed-for but unhoped for change. Cacophony of Bone maps the circle of a year - a journey from one place to another, field notes of a life - from one winter to the next. It is a telling of a changed life, in a changed world - and it is about all that does not change. All that which simply keeps on - living and breathing, nesting and dying - in spite of it all. When the pandemic came time seemed to shapeshift, so this is also a book about time. It is, too, a book about home, and what that can mean. Fragmentary in subject and form, fluid of language, this is an ode to a year, a place, and a love, that changed a life.

Full Product Details

9781838856298

Table of Contents

Reviews

I am a little in awe of Kerri ni Dochartaigh's work - the clarity and disinhibition of her storytelling; the wild freedom of her prose. Here is a brave and bold book, and one that deserves to be read, then read again -- HELEN JUKES Kerri ni Dochartaigh is something of a modern-day mystic, a writer of acute sensitivity and wonder. There is such beauty, such pain, such rawness in this diary of an extraordinary year - you read it feeling quickened, awakened - that you, too, are missing a layer of skin. It's a very special book indeed -- LUCY CALDWELL This is a brilliant second book from a unique and deeply gifted writer who constantly renews our sense of the natural world and the landscape of the heart -- KEVIN BARRY In Cacophony of Bone as in her previous work, Kerri has a deeply personal voice that feels as if it comes not from her, but from the earth beneath her -- MARC HAMER The writing has an incantatory quality. Teeming with abundance even when it is filled with grief, and wholly open to the world around it, in terms of nature and also the feelings and moods of the reader herself. Unlike anyone else writing just now -- NIAMH CAMPBELL Kerri Ni Dochartaigh's written form is unique and a wonder - like finding a 'hag-stone' on a beach of otherwise everyday solid pebbles - her words are strong and resilient, yet allow light to flow through their very core - Igniting hope, grief and allowing us to find connection with the other than human world -- JO SWEETING, @thestonecarver Praise for Thin Places: Kerri's voice is utterly her own, rich and strange. I've folded down the corners of many pages, marking sentences and moments that glitter out at me. Wow -- ROBERT MACFARLANE Dochartaigh takes great solace in nature, and much of the book is a meditation on the beautiful landscapes and flora and fauna that surround her . . . Passionate, moving and beautifully written * * Sunday Times * * [Kerri] is sensitive to the legacies of loss and trauma and highly attuned to the gifts of the natural world and the possibilities of place -- AMY LIPTROT Powerful, unflinching . . . Part hymn to nature, part memoir * * Guardian * *

Kerri Ni Dochartaigh's written form is unique and a wonder - like finding a 'hag-stone' on a beach of otherwise everyday solid pebbles - her words are strong and resilient, yet allow light to flow through their very core - Igniting hope, grief and allowing us to find connection with the other than human world -- JO SWEETING, @thestonecarver Praise for Thin Places: Kerri's voice is utterly her own, rich and strange. I've folded down the corners of many pages, marking sentences and moments that glitter out at me. Wow -- ROBERT MACFARLANE Dochartaigh takes great solace in nature, and much of the book is a meditation on the beautiful landscapes and flora and fauna that surround her . . . Passionate, moving and beautifully written * * Sunday Times * * [Kerri] is sensitive to the legacies of loss and trauma and highly attuned to the gifts of the natural world and the possibilities of place -- AMY LIPTROT Powerful, unflinching . . . Part hymn to nature, part memoir * * Guardian * * Piercingly honest, movingly heartfelt. There is so much soul and knowledge and compassion, it gave me shivers -- ELIF SHAFAK Full of wisdom and deeply engaging -- SINEAD GLEESON

Kerri ni Dochartaigh is something of a modern-day mystic, a writer of acute sensitivity and wonder. There is such beauty, such pain, such rawness in this diary of an extraordinary year - you read it feeling quickened, awakened - that you, too, are missing a layer of skin. It's a very special book indeed -- LUCY CALDWELL Kerri Ni Dochartaigh's written form is unique and a wonder - like finding a 'hag-stone' on a beach of otherwise everyday solid pebbles - her words are strong and resilient, yet allow light to flow through their very core - Igniting hope, grief and allowing us to find connection with the other than human world -- JO SWEETING, @thestonecarver Praise for Thin Places: Kerri's voice is utterly her own, rich and strange. I've folded down the corners of many pages, marking sentences and moments that glitter out at me. Wow -- ROBERT MACFARLANE Dochartaigh takes great solace in nature, and much of the book is a meditation on the beautiful landscapes and flora and fauna that surround her . . . Passionate, moving and beautifully written * * Sunday Times * * [Kerri] is sensitive to the legacies of loss and trauma and highly attuned to the gifts of the natural world and the possibilities of place -- AMY LIPTROT Powerful, unflinching . . . Part hymn to nature, part memoir * * Guardian * * Piercingly honest, movingly heartfelt. There is so much soul and knowledge and compassion, it gave me shivers -- ELIF SHAFAK Full of wisdom and deeply engaging -- SINEAD GLEESON

I am a little in awe of Kerri ni Dochartaigh's work - the clarity and disinhibition of her storytelling; the wild freedom of her prose. Here is a brave and bold book, and one that deserves to be read, then read again -- HELEN JUKES Kerri ni Dochartaigh is something of a modern-day mystic, a writer of acute sensitivity and wonder. There is such beauty, such pain, such rawness in this diary of an extraordinary year - you read it feeling quickened, awakened - that you, too, are missing a layer of skin. It's a very special book indeed -- LUCY CALDWELL Kerri Ni Dochartaigh's written form is unique and a wonder - like finding a 'hag-stone' on a beach of otherwise everyday solid pebbles - her words are strong and resilient, yet allow light to flow through their very core - Igniting hope, grief and allowing us to find connection with the other than human world -- JO SWEETING, @thestonecarver Praise for Thin Places: Kerri's voice is utterly her own, rich and strange. I've folded down the corners of many pages, marking sentences and moments that glitter out at me. Wow -- ROBERT MACFARLANE Dochartaigh takes great solace in nature, and much of the book is a meditation on the beautiful landscapes and flora and fauna that surround her . . . Passionate, moving and beautifully written * * Sunday Times * * [Kerri] is sensitive to the legacies of loss and trauma and highly attuned to the gifts of the natural world and the possibilities of place -- AMY LIPTROT Powerful, unflinching . . . Part hymn to nature, part memoir * * Guardian * * Piercingly honest, movingly heartfelt. There is so much soul and knowledge and compassion, it gave me shivers -- ELIF SHAFAK Full of wisdom and deeply engaging -- SINEAD GLEESON

Kerri's voice is utterly her own, rich and strange. I've folded down the corners of many pages, marking sentences and moments that glitter out at me. Wow -- ROBERT MACFARLANE Dochartaigh takes great solace in nature, and much of the book is a meditation on the beautiful landscapes and flora and fauna that surround her . . . Passionate, moving and beautifully written * * Sunday Times * * [Kerri] is sensitive to the legacies of loss and trauma and highly attuned to the gifts of the natural world and the possibilities of place -- AMY LIPTROT Powerful, unflinching . . . Part hymn to nature, part memoir * * Guardian * * Piercingly honest, movingly heartfelt. There is so much soul and knowledge and compassion, it gave me shivers -- ELIF SHAFAK Full of wisdom and deeply engaging -- SINEAD GLEESON

Author Information

Kerri ni Dochartaigh was born in 1983, in Derry-Londonderry at the border between the North and South of Ireland. She has written for the Guardian, the Irish Times, the BBC, Winter Papers and others. She is the author of Thin Places, which was highly commended by the Wainwright Prize for Nature Writing 2021. @kerri_ni

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