Cacophony of Bone

Product Information

From the acclaimed author of Thin Places, a luminous day book about an unexpected year and findinghome. For Kerri there was to be one more change, a longed-for but unhoped for change. Cacophony of Bone maps the circle of a year – a journey from one place to another, field notes of a life – from one winter to the next. It is a telling of a changed life, in a changed world – and it is about all that does not change. It is hard to describe what lessons Cacophony of Bone imparts. The more I try to articulate what ní Dochartaigh wants to tell us, the less I am able to. Her wisdom is like water — too strong, and too elusive, to be hooked. After reading it now, several times, I think perhaps this is the book’s power — that it fills the needs of the person who stands before it. It is a story of sobriety, or motherhood, or the choice not to become a mother at all. It is a book about grief, or healing, or the joy of birds, or the frustrations of gardening. It is a book about love, or trying to find the time to write. It is about the strength of community even when we are separated by vast space, and about the importance of proximity. It is about the beauty of a discarded bone, and the importance of always carrying a penknife.

Two days after the Winter Solstice in 2019 Kerri and her partner M moved to a small, remote railway cottage in the heart of Ireland. Time, she sees, does not pass inexorably like sand in a time-glass; moment does not smoothly succeed moment as she has been accustomed to believe. Rather, its motion is fitful and fluttering: “The only way I can put this,” ní Dochartaigh writes, “is to say that time has become erratic, hard to catch – to hold – identify.” C acophony of Bone is a book that touched me deeply. It's so vital, so brimming with life and love, and ni Dochartaigh's singular, addictive lyricism' LUCY JONES Bob Mortimer wins 2023 Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction with The Satsuma ComplexThis is a brilliant second book from a unique and deeply gifted writer who constantly renews our sense of the natural world and the landscape of the heart .' The delight of ní Dochartaigh’s writing is her capacity to measure compassion against observation. She writes with glee and factual appreciation of a ‘pile of fallen branches, a winter pyre of ghost-bark; lichen-limb’ tumbled into the stream that she thinks may be a thin place, before concluding ‘though I beg myself to be done with all of that.’ She describes the potential of the day held in the ‘white-toothed, clenched jaw’ of the morning but also shrugs and asks ‘Who gives a hoot how I spend my mornings.’ In this book, as in ní Dochartaigh’s last, the reader is drawn to her empathy, and her ability to marry it to a shrugging dispassion in a way that shakes the reader from any reverie of reverential self-seriousness.

Cacophony of Bone is ní Dochartaigh’s record of a year spent in an isolated stone cottage with her partner M in the strangest year in recent history. It is a symphony of memoir, nature journal, diary and musings of that year. However, minor gripes aside, this was a gorgeous look at the changing natural world in the year the human world (the unnatural world) stood still. I could hear about storm light and weather patterns and skylarks all day long. It really was beautifully written. I didn't realise until I was halfway through that I have the author's previous work Thin Places not only on my tbr but in my audiobook library - so I'll bump that up the list.All that which simply keeps on – living and breathing, nesting and dying – in spite of it all. When the pandemic came time seemed to shapeshift, so this is also a book about time. It is, too, a book about home, and what that can mean. Spears’ vulnerability shines through as she describes her painful journey from vulnerable girl to empowered woman. Raw, visionary, lucid and mystical, Cacophony of Bone speaks of the connection between all things, and the magic that can be found in everyday life' KATHERINE MAY

Take a Look at Our Summary of November Highlights, Whether You're Looking for the Latest Releases or Gift Inspiration What might it mean to focus on the sowing of seeds of hope in the face of such individual and collective despair? ní Dochartaigh writes in evocative, poetic prose that is quietly majestic. A spell and incantation of the best kind of magic; the ordinary, everyday. In diary form she notes both the personal and political. From the small: the changes of light, the flutter of a moths wing, the lighting of a candle. To the big: the injustice of the political and social crises, the grief and trauma of growing up in Ireland, the longing to be a mother, the birthing of hope.

You might also like

When I saw that Kerri ní Dochartaigh had a new book out, I was intrigued. Thin Places was often a tough read, especially going into it thinking it was nature writing like others of the genre have written. Nature was her solace and those thin places a kind of magical thing that kept her here. That book trawled through a northern Irish childhood, into a young adult trying to come out of the fog to find their place and way in the world and feel safe, fighting the after-effects of trauma. From nightmares to numbness, nature her nurturer. I find myself searching for the words of others as a means to fill the holes that the actions of (other) others have left in me. At the beginning of each chapter before the very brief diary entries, which are short poetic fragments and thoughts, there is a text, a navigation of layers of loneliness, grief and gratitude, observations of birds and moths, planning a garden and planting of seeds, the importance of rituals, an appreciation of the companionship of another human being, the connection with amazing women she has never yet met and the incredible comfort to be found in lines of language, of the soothing power of words and the immense power and wonder of books. Two days after the Winter Solstice in 2019 Kerri and her partner M moved to a small, remote railway cottage in the heart of Ireland. They were looking for a home, somewhere to stay put. What followed was a year of many changes. I am a little in awe of Kerri ní Dochartaigh's work – the clarity and disinhibition of her storytelling; the wild freedom of her prose. Here is a brave and bold book, and one that deserves to be read, then read again.'

When the pandemic came time seemed to shapeshift, so this is also a book about time. It is, too, a book about home, and what that can mean. Fragmentary in subject and form, fluid of language, this is an ode to a year, a place, and a love, that changed a life. About This Edition ISBN: This book is not about an easy return to earth, a quiet acquiescence to the routines of building a garden and a home, or the easy joy of settled domesticity. It is shot through with the appeal of these things in places, but ní Dochartaigh is more preoccupied with the strange layering of delight and dread that comes with considering time itself. With losing and gaining time to routine, to a pandemic, to the demands of a life which can only sometimes spare the space for writing. A greenhouse of seedlings is destroyed once, twice, by storms. Broadband is elusive. Work gets missed. Loneliness comes in waves. Storms keep her inside, claustrophobia mounting until she is sure she will ‘take to drumming at the bog, like a snipe.’ Dreams arrive and motifs return, the days are spent reaching for meaning, walking them through, collecting and abandoning them anew. In Cacophony of Bone as in her previous work, Kerri has a deeply personal voice that feels as if it comes not from her, but from the earth beneath her' MARC HAMERTeeming with abundance even when it is filled with grief, and wholly open to the world around it…Unlike anyone else writing just now.’ They were looking for a home, somewhere to stay put. What followed was a year of many changes. The pandemic arrived and their isolated home became a place of enforced isolation. Kerri ní Dochartaigh’s second book, a tender and luminous chronicle of the first year of the pandemic, explores new life and the meaning of home. What a talent, what a career, what a life, and what a treat to relive it all with this most down-to-earth of demigods. Editorial director Simon Thorogood bought world rights, excluding North America, from Kirsty McLachlan at Morgan Green Creatives. It will be published in April 2023.