Overview

In the city of Cork, a derelict Victorian mental hospital is being converted into modern apartments. One passerby has always flinched as she passes the place. Had she lived in another time, she too might have found herself held within those walls. Now, she notices a sign: FOR SALE. It is the first of many signs. Guided by an irresistible impulse, she follows them. Soon, she is trespassing, stealing, absconding from the routine of mother, spouse, daughter, as she uncovers a chorus of startling voices: those of the women who knew the hospital best. They murmur from archives and old records. They haunt from stairwells and walls. In them - and in one figure in particular -- she may find meaning and solace, righteous anger, salvation even. Or her final vanishing? A work of sublime intensity and tenderness, Said the Dead breaks the boundaries between worlds -- past and present, imagined and real, fact and fiction -- to make something new and lasting: an experience full of danger, full of love and full of truth. Praise for the work of Doireann Ní Ghríofa 'The effect is electric, like seeing a ghost returned to life.' New Statesman 'Obliterates every clear definition of genre and form . . . Astounding and utterly fresh.' Irish Independent 'Lush, lyrical prose that dazzles readers from the get-go . . . sumptuous, almost symphonic, in its intensity.' Sunday Times 'Past versus present, blood versus milk, birth versus death . . . dichotomies abound, but the questions of women's lived experiences and who history remembers link them all.' Paris Review

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Doireann Ní Ghríofa is an Irish writer. Her most recent book, A Ghost in the Throat, won the James Tait Black Prize, the An Post Book of the Year and was shortlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize. She is also the author of seven critically acclaimed books of poetry.

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