Said the Dead

De: Doireann Ní Ghríofa

Narrado por: Doireann Ní Ghríofa

From the award-winning author of A Ghost in the Throat comes a time-traversing, form-defying, genre-morphing story of a reader unraveling the legacies of a fabled asylum and the women who haunt its halls.

In Cork, Ireland, a derelict Victorian mental hospital is being converted into modern apartments. One passerby has always flinched as she nears the place. In another time, she might have found herself held within those walls.

She notices a sign, the first of many. Guided by an irresistible impulse, she follows them. FOR SALE. The letter L, broken free from a pane of stained glass. Whispers from the river. She trespasses, steals, absconds from the routines of her life—mother, spouse, daughter—as she hears a chorus of insistent voices. They murmur from archives, old casebooks that recorded their progress and failures—no change. They slip through stairwells and walls. They are the women who knew this place best, and with them—with one in particular—she feels a connection. She is drawn out; she knocks on a door in the night. Will this investigation, this journey, this haunting, take her too far into the past or will it bring her to a new understanding of what she might yet make of the future?

A work of intense attention and tenderness, Doireann Ní Ghríofa's Said the Dead breaks boundaries between past and present, the imagined and real, history and fiction, to make something new and lasting. An investigation into the dangers of knowing our selves and the past, it is an experience like no other—a ghost story and a reclamation.

Reseñas de la Crítica

“A haunting, visionary act of witness; this book will be read for decades to come.”
—Anne Enright, author of The Wren, The Wren

“Said the Dead is one of those rare books where a reader encounters the writer and her characters at a dazzling and bewitching height, at a place where essence meets essence. A piercingly beautiful book that is wounding sometimes and consoling at others, the work, in the end, is life confirming: encompassed in the volume is the unparalleled expansiveness and depth of human minds and hearts.”
—Yiyun Li, author of Things in Nature Merely Grow

“Doireann Ní Ghríofa goes to a place where the veil thins and the worlds meet, and crosses over, and returns, again and again, with living stories of the dead. You can feel the bravery of these acts of psychic trespass, and their sincerity makes for a mysterious and beautiful and thoroughly absorbing book, which continues to reverberate long after you finish it.”
—Lucy Caldwell, author of These Days

“An entrancing book—lyrical and propulsive, it sounds out the echoes of history and finds voices and images that are moving and indelible. Reading this book is like being put under a spell.”
—Seán Hewitt, author of Rapture’s Road

“Said the Dead is an audacious book that refuses to be anything but its own irreducible self. It is part narrative non-fiction, part poem, part novel, part work of eccentric and ecstatic scholarship. Like much of the best writing, though, it makes a mockery of the idea of genre categorisation. Doireann ní Ghríofa remains a unique presence in Irish literature; as a reader, I would follow her into any darkness.”
—Mark O’Connell, author of Bond, Queer Bond

“There’s magic in this one—a hauntingly beautiful and vivid and necessary book.”
—Kevin Barry, author of The Heart in Winter