Thin Places

English language

Published May 5, 2022 by Canongate Books.

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

Kerri ní Dochartaigh was born in Derry at the very height of the Troubles. One parent was Catholic, the other Protestant. In the space of a year Kerri’s family were forced out of two homes and when she was eleven a homemade petrol bomb was thrown through her bedroom window. For families like hers, terror was in the very fabric of the city. In Thin Places, Kerri explores how nature kept her sane and helped her heal, and how we are again allowing our borders to become hard and terror to creep back in. Kerri asks us to reclaim and rejoice in our landscape, and to remember that the land we fight over is much more than lines on a map.

4 editions

Words from the cracks

5 stars

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'

5 stars

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 …