Thin Places

An Indie Next Selection for April 2022

An Indies Introduce Selection for Winter/Spring 2022

A Junior Library Guild Selection

Both a celebration of the natural world and a memoir of one family's experience during the Troubles, Thin Places is a gorgeous braid of "two strands, one wondrous and elemental, the other violent and unsettling, sustained by vividly descriptive prose" (The Guardian).

Kerri ní Dochartaigh was born in Derry, on the border of the North and South of Ireland, at the very height of the Troubles. She was brought up on a council estate on the wrong side of town--although for her family, and many others, there was no right side. One parent was Catholic, the other was Protestant. In the space of one year, they were forced out of two homes. When she was eleven, a homemade bomb was thrown through her bedroom window. Terror was in the very fabric of the city, and for families like ní Dochartaigh's, the ones who fell between the cracks of identity, it seemed there was no escape.

In Thin Places, a luminous blend of memoir, history, and nature writing, ní Dochartaigh explores how nature kept her sane and helped her heal, how violence and poverty are never more than a stone's throw from beauty and hope, and how we are, once again, allowing our borders to become hard and terror to creep back in. Ní Dochartaigh asks us to reclaim our landscape through language and study, and remember that the land we fight over is much more than lines on a map. It will always be ours, but--at the same time--it never really was.

Author: Kerri Ní Dochartaigh
Publisher: Milkweed Editions
Published: 04/12/2022
Pages: 240
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.00lbs
Size: 8.58h x 5.51w x 0.87d
ISBN: 9781571311955

Review Citation(s):
Publishers Weekly 01/10/2022
Kirkus Reviews 02/01/2022
Foreword 02/27/2022
Booklist 03/01/2022 pg. 14