A Ghost in the Throat

Winner of The James Tait Black Memorial Prize
Winner of the Book of the Year, the Irish Book Awards
Winner of the Foyles Non-Fiction Book of the Year
Nominated for the Rathbones Folio Prize, Desmond Elliot Prize and Republic of Consciousness Prize

A true original, this stunning prose debut by Doireann Ní Ghríofa weaves two stories together. In the 1700s, an Irish noblewoman, on discovering her husband has been murdered, drinks handfuls of his blood and composes an extraordinary poem that reaches across the centuries to another poet. In the present day, a young mother narrowly avoids tragedy in her own life. On encountering the poem, she becomes obsessed with finding out the rest of the story.

Doireann Ní Ghríofa has sculpted a fluid hybrid of essay and autofiction to explore the ways in which a life can be changed in response to the discovery of another's -- in this case, Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill's Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire, famously referred to by Peter Levi as 'the greatest poem written in either Ireland or Britain during the eighteenth century.'

A devastating and timeless tale about finding your voice by freeing another's.

“Genre-defying…captivatingly original.” THE GUARDIAN

“One of the best books of this dreadful year.” THE SUNDAY TIMES

"A book like this comes along once every few years and obliterates every clear definition of genre and form. I mean no exaggeration here: A Ghost in the Throat is astounding and utterly fresh." THE IRISH INDEPENDENT