Book Club: A Ghost in the Throat by Doireann Ní Ghríofa

Madison Books hosts an in-person Book Club meeting every month at 7:00 p.m., usually but not always on the first Wednesday. All readers are welcome--there's no registration to sign or dues to pay. Drop in to chat with your neighbors about some of the best books of this or any moment. Meetings are currently held at Fox Ridge Studio, adjacent to the bookstore.

October's selection is the internationally-acclaimed A Ghost in the Throat by Doireann Ní Ghríofa. In the eighteenth century, on discovering her husband has been murdered, an Irish noblewoman drinks handfuls of his blood and composes an extraordinary lament that reaches across centuries to the young Doireann Ní Ghríofa, whose fascination with it is later rekindled when she narrowly avoids fatal tragedy in her own life and becomes obsessed with learning everything she can about the poem Peter Levi has famously called "the greatest poem written in either Ireland or Britain" during its era. A kaleidoscopic blend of memoir, autofiction, and literary studies, A Ghost in the Throat moves fluidly between past and present, quest and elegy, poetry and the people who make it.

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.

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

Fox Ridge Studio, 4116 1/2 East Madison Street, Seattle, United States