Said the Dead

From the author of A Ghost in the Throat, an unforgettable book - both history and ghost story - that will leave you gasping by its final page.





In the city of Cork, a derelict Victorian mental hospital is being converted into modern apartments. One passerby has always flinched as she passes the place. Had her birth occurred in another decade, she too might have lived within those walls. Now, she notices a sign: FOR SALE. It is the first of many signs. Following them, she finds herself drawn into an irresistible river of forgotten voices, those of the women who knew this place best: insistent, vivid and true. They murmur from archives and old records; they whisper from stairwells and walls. Among them - and in one figure in particular -- she may find meaning, solace, rage; her own salvation, perhaps, or her own vanishing?





A work of sublime intensity and tenderness, Said the Dead breaks the boundaries between worlds -- past and present, imagined and real -- to make something lasting and new: an experience full of danger, full of love and full of truth.





Praise for the work of Doireann Ní Ghríofa



'The effect is electric, like seeing a ghost returned to life.' New Statesman





'Obliterates every clear definition of genre and form . . . Astounding and utterly fresh.' Irish Independent





'Lush, lyrical prose that dazzles readers from the get-go . . . sumptuous, almost symphonic, in its intensity.' Sunday Times





'Past versus present, blood versus milk, birth versus death . . . dichotomies abound, but the questions of women's lived experiences and who history remembers link them all.' Paris Review



Doireann Ní Ghríofa is an Irish writer. Her most recent book, A Ghost in the Throat, won the James Tait Black Prize, the An Post Book of the Year and was shortlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize. She is also the author of seven critically acclaimed books of poetry.