Location: 157 Winslow Way E., Bainbridge Island, WA 98110 | Map Hours: 10am-6pm daily | Phone: (206) 842-5332
“Memoir and folklore weave together in this haunting story of a childhood unfolding during the Troubles in Northern Ireland, capturing a burning desire to find balance and peace. Superbly beautiful, raw, and heartbreaking writing.”
— BJ Hegedus, Postalworks Silver Lake, Los Angeles, CA
"There are places that haunt us," writes Kerri Ní Dochartaigh – the homes we've left behind, the countries or cities that have sundered while we lived there, the forests we explored with loved ones. Thin Places is a tender paean to the places the author has loved, left, or returned to, but it is also a deeply personal history of trauma and grief, of growing up in Ireland during the Troubles, and of the landscapes (both mythic and natural) that have been her places (and solaces) throughout. This is a remarkable book about borders and liminal spaces, about what it's like to come from a "hollowed-out place," and about coming to terms with the constant layering of grief. ~Rafe
— From RafeAn Indies Introduce Selection for Winter/Spring 2022
A Junior Library Guild Selection
Both a celebration of the natural world and a memoir of one family's experience during the Troubles, Thin Places is a gorgeous braid of "two strands, one wondrous and elemental, the other violent and unsettling, sustained by vividly descriptive prose" (The Guardian). Kerri n 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 n 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, n 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. N 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.