Cacophony of Bone

Product Information

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 glimpse into the nature of time is one of many moments of perception caught and shared in this generous, glowing book. Cacophony of Bone is structured as a journal, month by devastating month in a plague year, and its form glances at many additional antecedents. To notice those things and to hold them, give my furry body over to their coming, to stop hurrying through life like a person shamed, by my female body and its traumas, by my past, by what that body could not have, what its parts could not produce.

From the acclaimed author of Thin Places, a luminous day book about an unexpected year and findinghome. C acophony 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 This book is not about an easy return to earth, a quiet acquiescence to the routines of building a garden and a home, or the easy joy of settled domesticity. It is shot through with the appeal of these things in places, but ní Dochartaigh is more preoccupied with the strange layering of delight and dread that comes with considering time itself. With losing and gaining time to routine, to a pandemic, to the demands of a life which can only sometimes spare the space for writing. A greenhouse of seedlings is destroyed once, twice, by storms. Broadband is elusive. Work gets missed. Loneliness comes in waves. Storms keep her inside, claustrophobia mounting until she is sure she will ‘take to drumming at the bog, like a snipe.’ This is transformative writing, true and haunting, but most of all, hopeful. It sings with light and life.’I’m definitely jealous of this new Cool Girl archetype as I couldn’t help but comparing the dates of the diaries to my own 2020. Especially as for quite a few specific dates in the past we have swam in the same sea and looked at the same Galway streets. I suppose it upsets me to read the wonderfully privileged account of somebody I would have seen in the queue for Kai while crying in my bedroom. 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. 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," the synopsis explains. "This is a time like no other, but it is also exactly like any other, too. The longest day came, as always it does – and the shortest came, too – in turn. This book is about time, that oddly boned creature; how it shapeshifts, right before our eyes. The pandemic has altered the way many of us view or experience time, and yet we watch as the natural world continues its unfurling, just as it always has, right outside our doors. It is also a book about home, and what that can mean. Home can be a place, a person, or perhaps even nature. I am a little in awe of Kerri ní 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.' 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

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 Canongate are the best publishing house around and I am so grateful for their incredible work on Thin Places," she said. "I’m so excited to work with Simon on Cacophony of Bone, a book that takes my writing in a new direction. I hope Cacophony might deliver a little light to any reader that encounters it along the way. I am proud to continue my journey with Canongate and so grateful to everyone that continues to make this possible; it’s a deep joy." 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. Time, she sees, does not pass inexorably like sand in a time-glass; moment does not smoothly succeed moment as she has been accustomed to believe. Rather, its motion is fitful and fluttering: “The only way I can put this,” ní Dochartaigh writes, “is to say that time has become erratic, hard to catch – to hold – identify.” Bob Mortimer wins 2023 Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction with The Satsuma Complex

Cacophony of Bone is a telling of a changed life, in a changed world – but it is, too, about all that which does not change. All that which simply keeps on – living and breathing, nesting and dying – in spite of it all. Fragmentary in subject and form, fluid of language; this is an ode to a year, a place, and a love, that changed a life. Told month by month, in three parts, through diary extracts, poetry, essay and hybrid prose, its form reflects the time, and the place, that helped to mould it." Take a Look at Our Summary of November Highlights, Whether You're Looking for the Latest Releases or Gift Inspiration

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 delight of ní Dochartaigh’s writing is her capacity to measure compassion against observation. She writes with glee and factual appreciation of a ‘pile of fallen branches, a winter pyre of ghost-bark; lichen-limb’ tumbled into the stream that she thinks may be a thin place, before concluding ‘though I beg myself to be done with all of that.’ She describes the potential of the day held in the ‘white-toothed, clenched jaw’ of the morning but also shrugs and asks ‘Who gives a hoot how I spend my mornings.’ In this book, as in ní Dochartaigh’s last, the reader is drawn to her empathy, and her ability to marry it to a shrugging dispassion in a way that shakes the reader from any reverie of reverential self-seriousness. What might it mean to focus on the sowing of seeds of hope in the face of such individual and collective despair? I find myself searching for the words of others as a means to fill the holes that the actions of (other) others have left in me. While that book was challenging because of all it makes the reader feel, Cacophony of Bone was proof of a move forward, of a shift out of the rawness of her earlier existence and while still in the process of healing, clear signs of hope and progress and development.Dreams arrive and motifs return, the days are spent reaching for meaning, walking them through, collecting and abandoning them anew. 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. Ritual finds form through the assumption that it is a means of really knowing something. Religious ceremony and personal rites of passage fill my thoughts. The gently, insistent act of repeating. How it creates equilibrium between the small and the vast, the seen and the unseen, the self and other, the part and the whole. We build myths (which are really just houses). Dwelling places built of the bones left behind by stories. We fill the gaps in the walls with ritual. We insulate it with objects. Teeming with abundance even when it is filled with grief, and wholly open to the world around it…Unlike anyone else writing just now.’ Kerri ní Dochartaigh’s ‘Cacophony of Bone’ — a circular ode to a year, a place, and a love that changed a life — is just-published by Canongate. The author’s wisdom is like water, writes Róisín Á Costello.