Cacophony of Bone: The Circle of a Year (Hardcover)
Staff Reviews
Reading this book was an unforgettable experience. Kerri ní Dochartaigh has a miraculous way of stringing words together with precision and lyricism, while wrapping you in a comforting cocoon of hope. Kerri kept a daily journal in 2020, noting the crests and valleys of the emotional waves she experienced throughout quarantine. Although we all dealt with isolation in our own ways, reading her perspective was like applying a soothing balm over the memory of that time. She felt fear, loneliness and anxiety like all of us; but she also felt hope, love and wonder in having her world narrowed, realizing there is so much to appreciate about the simplicity of home and the wild spaces around us. Exquisitely done and profoundly moving, this book is everything we need to remember the importance of protecting the natural world. — From Natalie's Picks
December 2023 Indie Next List
“A gorgeous, elegiac meditation on time, the natural world, and all the aspects of life that we can only understand through our mind’s eye. Kerri ní Dochartaigh is a gifted writer and Cacophony of Bone is a joy to read.”
— Debra Ginsberg, DIESEL, A Bookstore, Santa Monica, CA
Description
A December 2023 Indie Next Pick, selected by booksellers
A Kirkus Reviews "Most Anticipated Book of the Fall 2023"From the acclaimed author of Thin Places, a luminous day book about an unexpected year and finding home.
Two days after the winter solstice in 2019, Kerri and her partner moved to a remote cottage in the heart of Ireland. They were looking for a home, somewhere to settle into a stable life. Then the pandemic arrived and their secluded abode became a place of enforced isolation. What was meant to be the beginning of an enriching new chapter was instead marked by uncertainty and fear. The seasons still passed, the swallows returned, the rhythms of the natural world went on, but in many ways 2020 was unlike any year we had seen before. And for Kerri there would be one more change: a baby, longed for but utterly, beautifully unexpected.Intensely lyrical, fragmentary in subject and form, Cacophony of Bone is an ode to a year, a place, and a love that transformed a life. When the pandemic came, time seemed to shapeshift; in Kerri's elegant prose, we can trace its quickening, its slowing. She maps the circle of a year--a journey from one place to another, field notes of a life--from one winter to the next, telling of a changed life in a changed world, as well as all that stays the same. All that keeps on living and breathing, nesting and dying. This is a book for the reader who wants to slow down, guided by a voice that is utterly singular, "rich and strange," (Robert Macfarlane). A book about home--the deepening of family, the connections that sustain us.