Said the Dead

By: Doireann Ní Ghríofa

From the author of the extraordinary, genre-bending, award-winning A Ghost in the Throat comes a stunning new prose work that again bends the limits of time, space and genre.

In November 1896, a young doctor named Lucia Strangman walks through the door of a lunatic asylum, where she will devote many years to recording her patients’ lives in a series of thick casebooks. More than a century later, a stranger finds these crumbling volumes and devotes her own years to discovering what they reveal of human suffering and healing, of care and harm, of trauma, dread, love, and joy.

Said the Dead follows this stranger—a reader—as she becomes acquainted with Lucia, and the female patients Lucia treats, by way of archived casebooks and clues hidden in the landscape of the asylum grounds (now remade into residential apartments), by way of a pandemic, and by way of a spectral visitor knocking on the door at night. What emerges is an astonishing act of empathy across time, in which past and present are both given voice—and both ask the same question: where might death and sanity reside?

Critic reviews

“Said the Dead is one of those rare books where a reader encounters the writer and her characters at a dazzling and bewitching height, at a place where essence meets essence. A piercingly beautiful book that is wounding sometimes and consoling at others, the work, in the end, is life confirming: encompassed in the volume is the unparalleled expansiveness and depth of human minds and hearts.” —Yiyun Li, author of Things in Nature Merely Grow

“A haunting, visionary act of witness; this book will be read for decades to come.” —Anne Enright

“An entrancing book—lyrical and propulsive, it sounds out the echoes of history and finds voices and images that are moving and indelible. Reading this book is like being put under a spell.” —Seán Hewitt

“There’s magic in this one—a hauntingly beautiful and vivid and necessary book. —Kevin Barry