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Thin Places

Author(s) : Kerri ni Dochartaigh

Reviews and Endorsements

A remarkable piece of writing. I don't think I've ever read a book as open-hearted as this. It resists easy pieties of nature as a healing force, but nevertheless charts a recovery which could never have been achieved without landscape, wild creatures and "thin places". It is also flocked with luminous details (moths, birds, feathers, skulls, moving water). 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, this is a remarkable account of trauma and ways to acknowledge and overcome it - Sunday Times

What was Kerri ni Dochartaigh's burden as a child - to exist in "the gaps between" the Catholic and Protestant communities in Northern Ireland - has become her gift as a writer. She is sensitive to the legacies of loss and trauma and highly attuned to the gifts of the natural world and the possibilities of place. This is a special, beautiful, many-faceted book - Amy Liptrot

Powerful, unflinching . . . Part hymn to nature, part Troubles memoir . . . Vividly descriptive . . . Thin Places is at heart a survivor's story located in the real and brutally Darwinian world of lived experience - The Guardian, Book of the Day

An eloquent, moving work of politics, geography and the self. Full of wisdom and deeply engaging - Sinead Gleeson

The power of place to heal trauma makes for a beautiful read . . . It contains moments of great beauty . . . It is heady, bright and difficult to pin down. It is also redemptive. The Irish word for hope, we are told, is dochas or doigh, which holds, within its roots, glimmers of doighiuil, the word for giving. Ni Dochartaigh takes that hope and gives it to us all - Big Issue

A beautiful and harrowing book about trauma, the potential to heal and the subtle magic of the wild. Kerri ni Dochartaigh offers us a fragile kind of redemption, full of truth and solace - Katherine May

Ni Dochartaigh's delight in wild things weaves a thread of light through her childhood, adulthood and the book itself . . . Acutely personal . . . Wonderfully evocative . . . This heartfelt memoir, with its message on the saving grace of nature, may speak to an even wider audience than it first imagined - Daily Mail

A powerful, bracing memoir that asks what happens when a child grows up in a city that isn't safe . . . This is a book that will make you see the world differently - Irish Times

It seems as if everything about life is contained within the covers of this astonishing book: politics, history, nature, language and of course, love. A profound and moving work of art. This is a really special book - certainly, I've never read one quite like it - Christine Dwyer Hickey