Thin Places

English language

Published July 23, 2022 by Canongate Books.

ISBN:
978-1-78689-964-4
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(3 reviews)

Both a celebration of the natural world and a memoir of one family’s experience during the Troubles, Thin Places is a gorgeous braid of “two strands, one wondrous and elemental, the other violent and unsettling, sustained by vividly descriptive prose” (The Guardian).

Kerri ní Dochartaigh was born in Derry, on the border of the North and South of Ireland, at the very height of the Troubles. She was brought up on a council estate on the wrong side of town—although for her family, and many others, there was no right side. One parent was Catholic, the other was Protestant. In the space of one year, they were forced out of two homes. When she was eleven, a homemade bomb was thrown through her bedroom window. Terror was in the very fabric of the city, and for families like ní Dochartaigh’s, the ones who fell between the cracks of identity, it …

4 editions

Words from the cracks

This extraordinary book manages to offer so many things simultaneously: it is a story of trauma and healing, of moments and lifetimes, of time and space. The words are both written about and embedded in thin places.

Kerri Ní Dochartaigh is a wonderfully fluid writer, and this book tells her story of her life, beginning through the Troubles in Northern Ireland, caught in between places, with parents from either side of a bitter divide. These divides continue to haunt her life – moments of joy in the natural world counter-balanced with mental health issues in her city life, but it is in the thin places between that she finds solace. These places are borrowed from Irish mythology, and are moments that are liminal and often otherworldly. The pages ooze with honest, considered pain but also with a sunrise of hope constantly creeping over the horizon. I read the last 50 …

Review of 'Thin Places' on 'Goodreads'

This is one of those books where it is hard to do a review that does justice, there is no way I can put together enough coherent words to show you just how powerful this book is….but I’m gonna do it anyways. As a person who has led a safe and sheltered life it really does blow my mind how some people are able to take so many hits in life, be witness to so much trauma and still be standing on their own two feet at the end of it. Kerri was born to a Protestant parent and the other parent was a Catholic, in the time and place she was born this was not a safe combination. Humanity’s ability to be so cruel always amazes me, neighbours can so easily turn on each other with (to me) no logical reason. Growing up in and around Derry, Kerri was …

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