Doireann Ní Ghríofa + Megan Nolan: Said the Dead

Moderating the conversation is Megan Nolan, author of Ordinary Human Failings. This event will be hosted in the Strand Book Store's 3rd floor Rare Book Room at 828 Broadway on 12th Street.

Can’t make the event? Purchase a signed copy of Said the Dead here.

ACCESSIBILITY:

Strand Book Store is an ADA compliant venue. The event space is accessible via elevator. Please ask a Strand employee upon arrival for directions to accessible seating if preferred.

ASL interpretation is available for this event by request only. Please reach out to our events team at events@strandbooks.com by Oct 9 to request.

For further information on accessibility in this space, or to make a request, please contact events@strandbooks.com.

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From the award-winning author of A Ghost in the Throat comes a time-traversing, form-defying, genre-morphing story of a reader unraveling the legacies of a fabled asylum and the women who haunt its halls.

In Cork, Ireland, a derelict Victorian mental hospital is being converted into modern apartments. One passerby has always flinched as she nears the place. In another time, she might have found herself held within those walls.

She notices a sign, the first of many. Guided by an irresistible impulse, she follows them. FOR SALE. The letter L, broken free from a pane of stained glass. Whispers from the river. She trespasses, steals, absconds from the routines of her life—mother, spouse, daughter—as she hears a chorus of insistent voices. They murmur from archives, old casebooks that recorded their progress and failures—no change. They slip through stairwells and walls. They are the women who knew this place best, and with them—with one in particular—she feels a connection. She is drawn out; she knocks on a door in the night. Will this investigation, this journey, this haunting, take her too far into the past or will it bring her to a new understanding of what she might yet make of the future?

A work of intense attention and tenderness, Doireann Ní Ghríofa's Said the Dead breaks boundaries between past and present, the imagined and real, history and fiction, to make something new and lasting. An investigation into the dangers of knowing our selves and the past, it is an experience like no other—a ghost story and a reclamation.