Irish Bestsellers 12th December 2020

It’s been a good week for books as we prepare for Christmas – remember to shop local if you can and that EVERYONE this year should have a book under the tree!

This week we’re delighted to feature the An Post Irish Book Awards Book of the Year, A Ghost in the Throat, by Doireann Ni Ghriofa. This is a beautiful book plucked off the slushpile at Tramp Press by two of the brightest, most brilliant women in UK and Irish publishing, Sarah Davis-Goff and Lisa Coen. Doireann Ní Ghríofa is a poet and essayist. A Ghost in the Throat, finds the eighteenth-century poet Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill haunting the life of a contemporary young mother, prompting her to turn detective. Doireann is also author of six critically-acclaimed books of poetry, each a deepening exploration of birth, death, desire, and domesticity. Awards for her writing include a Lannan Literary Fellowship (USA), the Ostana Prize (Italy), a Seamus Heaney Fellowship (Queen’s University), the Hartnett Poetry Award, and the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, among others…

When we first met, I was a child, and she had been dead for centuries.

I am eleven, a dark-haired child given to staring out window … Her voice makes it 1773, a fine day in May, and puts English soldiers crouching in ambush; I add ditch-water to drench their knees. Their muskets point towards a young man who is falling from his saddle in slow, slow motion. A woman hurries in and kneels over him, her voice rising in an antique formula of breath and syllable the teacher calls a caoineadh, a keen to lament the dead.’

A true original, this stunning prose debut by Doireann Ní Ghríofa weaves two stories together. In the 1700s, an Irish noblewoman, on discovering her husband has been murdered, drinks handfuls of his blood and composes an extraordinary poem that reaches across the centuries to another poet. In the present day, a young mother narrowly avoids tragedy in her own life. On encountering the poem, she becomes obsessed with finding out the rest of the story.

Doireann Ní Ghríofa has sculpted a fluid hybrid of essay and autofiction to explore the ways in which a life can be changed in response to the discovery of another’s – in this case, Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill’s Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire, famously referred to by Peter Levi as ‘the greatest poem written in either Ireland or Britain during the eighteenth century.’

A devastating and timeless tale about finding your voice by freeing another’s. Pick up you copy online here at Dubray Books, or call your local bookshop!

Here’s the overall top 20, data supplied by Nielsen BookScan taken from the Irish Consumer Market week ending 12th December 2020

And the top 10 in each category are: