Cacophony of Bone

Product Information

Spears’ vulnerability shines through as she describes her painful journey from vulnerable girl to empowered woman. 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.

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. Kerri ní Dochartaigh’s second book, a tender and luminous chronicle of the first year of the pandemic, explores new life and the meaning of home.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. This is transformative writing, true and haunting, but most of all, hopeful. It sings with light and life.’ 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. 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." 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.

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Praise and Prizes

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 .' 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 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. 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 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.

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.' 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.To action that will carry us far from what we deem as safe, and perhaps it is time to listen to that call.” 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 Dreams arrive and motifs return, the days are spent reaching for meaning, walking them through, collecting and abandoning them anew. When I saw that Kerri ní Dochartaigh had a new book out, I was intrigued. Thin Places was often a tough read, especially going into it thinking it was nature writing like others of the genre have written. Nature was her solace and those thin places a kind of magical thing that kept her here. That book trawled through a northern Irish childhood, into a young adult trying to come out of the fog to find their place and way in the world and feel safe, fighting the after-effects of trauma. From nightmares to numbness, nature her nurturer.