Author(s): Kerri ni Dochartaigh

Literature | Biography and Memoir | Ireland | Nature Writing

A lyrical and captivating meditation on nature, time and the meaning of home from the acclaimed author of Thin Places

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. The pandemic arrived and their isolated home became a place of enforced isolation. It was to be a year unlike any we had seen before. But the seasons still turned, the swallows came at their allotted time, the rhythms of the natural world went on unchecked. 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. 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. Fragmentary in subject and form, fluid of language, this is an ode to a year, a place, and a love, that changed a life.

Review: '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
'I am a little in awe of Kerri ni 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' - HELEN JUKES
'Kerri ni Dochartaigh is one of those rare writers - like Dickinson, like Blake - whose way of seeing and being burns fierce and bright. Out from a year of intense isolation comes this hope-giving story about a soul taking flight and new life taking root' - TANYA SHADRICK
'Kerri ni Dochartaigh's words have a rare power to chime with her readers' souls. Raw, honest, and beautiful, I know I'll return to Cacophony of Bone monthly, seasonally and yearly to be moved and healed by this stunningly intimate book' - MOLLY AITKEN
'Kerri ni Dochartaigh is something of a modern-day mystic, a writer of acute sensitivity and wonder. There is such beauty, such pain, such rawness in this diary of an extraordinary year - you read it feeling quickened, awakened - that you, too, are missing a layer of skin. It's a very special book indeed' - LUCY CALDWELL

Prizes: Long-listed for Wainwright Prize for Nature Writing 2023 (UK).

Author Biography: Kerri ni Dochartaigh was born in 1983, in Derry-Londonderry at the border between the North and South of Ireland. She has written for the Guardian, the Irish Times, the BBC, Winter Papers and others. She is the author of Thin Places, which was highly commended by the Wainwright Prize for Nature Writing 202