Description

LONGLISTED FOR THE WAINWRIGHT PRIZE FOR NATURE WRITING
A WATERSTONES BEST BOOK OF 2023: NATURE AND TRAVEL
A COUNTRYFILE CHRISTMAS GIFT BOOK

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.

Publisher 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 This is a brilliant second book from a unique and deeply gifted writer who constantly renews our sense of the natural world and the landscape of the heart -- KEVIN BARRY What joy, to find oneself once more in the world of Kerri Ni Dochartaigh, following her through the astonishments of her days, where each moment is deeply felt and each page is written with such nimble meticulousness. Cacophony of Bone is neat as a robin's nest, and just as wondrous -- DOIREANN Ni GHRiOFA A strange and beautiful book - a collage of glittering images, moments, feelings, sensations. A selection of shining objects gathered on windowsill for safekeeping. A careful record of a fulcrum year, with all its joys and pains laid out on the page; Kerri ni Dochartaigh is a prose poet with keen eyes and a huge heart -- CAL FLYN In Cacophony of Bone as in her previous work, Kerri has a deeply personal voice that feels as if it comes not from her, but from the earth beneath her -- MARC HAMER 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 Cacophony of Bone is a book that touched me deeply. It's so vital, so brimming with life and love, and ni Dochartaigh's singular, addictive lyricism -- LUCY JONES 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 Reading Kerri ni Dochartaigh's Cacophony of Bone is like stepping inside the place where poetry comes from. In these pages objects, time, form, memory, grief, politics, sensuality and change meet. It's a conversation, a prayer, an address, and an answer -- PaDRAIG O TUAMA My heart expands as I read each simple but stirring page. There's an intensity and profundity to Kerri's words that I've never encountered in prose before -- MANCHaN MAGAN