Virtual Event: Kerri ní Dochartaigh

Harvard Book Store's virtual event series welcomes Irish author KERRI NÍ DOCHARTAIGH for a discussion of her new memoir Thin Places: A Natural History of Healing and Home. She will be joined in conversation by MAGGIE SMITH, author of the national bestsellers Goldenrod and Keep Moving.

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While payment is not required, we are suggesting a $5 contribution to support this author series, our staff, and the future of Harvard Book Store—a locally owned, independently run Cambridge institution. In addition, by pre-ordering a copy of Thin Places on harvard.com, you support indie bookselling and the writing community during this difficult time.

About Thin Places

Kerri ní Dochartaigh was born in Derry, on the border of the North and South of Ireland, at the very height of the Troubles. She was brought up on a council estate on the wrong side of town—although for her family, and many others, there was no right side. One parent was Catholic, the other was Protestant. In the space of one year, they were forced out of two homes. When she was eleven, a homemade bomb was thrown through her bedroom window. Terror was in the very fabric of the city, and for families like ní Dochartaigh’s, the ones who fell between the cracks of identity, it seemed there was no escape.

In Thin Places, a luminous blend of memoir, history, and nature writing, ní Dochartaigh explores how nature kept her sane and helped her heal, how violence and poverty are never more than a stone’s throw from beauty and hope, and how we are, once again, allowing our borders to become hard and terror to creep back in. Ní Dochartaigh asks us to reclaim our landscape through language and study, and remember that the land we fight over is much more than lines on a map. It will always be ours, but—at the same time—it never really was.

Praise for Thin Places

“A remarkable piece of writing. I don’t think I’ve ever read a book as open-hearted as this. It resists easy pieties of nature as a healing force, but nevertheless charts a recovery which could never have been achieved without landscape, wild creatures and ‘thin places.’ It is also flocked with luminous details (moths, birds, feathers, skulls, moving water). Kerri’s voice is utterly her own, rich and strange. I’ve folded down the corners of many pages, marking sentences and moments that glitter out at me. Wow.”—Robert Macfarlane, author of Underland

“A beautiful and harrowing book about trauma, the potential to heal and the subtle magic of the wild. Kerri ní Dochartaigh offers us a fragile kind of redemption, full of truth and solace.”—Katherine May, author of Wintering

“What was Kerri ní Dochartaigh’s burden as a child—to exist in ‘the gaps between’ the Catholic and Protestant communities in Northern Ireland—has become her gift as a writer. She is sensitive to the legacies of loss and trauma and highly attuned to the gifts of the natural world and the possibilities of place. This is a special, beautiful, many-faceted book.”—Amy Liptrot, author of The Outrun