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 husbands body, an eighteenth-century Irish noblewoman drinks handfuls of his blood and composes an extraordinary lament. Eibhln Dubh N Chonaills 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 Eibhln Dubhs life to flimsy sketches, she wants more: the details of the poets 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 Ni Ghriofa sets out to discover Eibhln Dubhs erased lifeand 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 anothers.