Cacophony of Bone

Author: Kerri ni Dochartaigh
Format: Hardback, 144mm x 220mm, 418g, 304 pages
Published: Canongate Books, United Kingdom, 2023

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.

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 2021. @kerri_ni