SHORTLISTED FOR THE WAINWRIGHT PRIZE FOR NATURE WRITING - HIGHLY COMMENDED

'Remarkable' Robert Macfarlane
'Beautiful' Amy Liptrot
'Powerful, unflinching . . . Part hymn to nature, part Troubles memoir' Guardian

Kerri ní Dochartaigh was born in Derry at the very height of the Troubles. One parent was Catholic, the other Protestant. In the space of a year Kerri's family were forced out of two homes and when she was eleven a homemade petrol bomb was thrown through her bedroom window. For families like hers, terror was in the very fabric of the city.

In Thin Places, Kerri explores how nature kept her sane and helped her heal, and how we are again allowing our borders to become hard and terror to creep back in. Kerri asks us to reclaim and rejoice in our landscape, and to remember that the land we fight over is much more than lines on a map.

"Dochartaigh takes great solace in nature, and much of the book is a meditation on the beautiful landscapes and flora and fauna that surround her . . . Passionate, moving and beautifully written, this is a remarkable account of trauma and ways to acknowledge and overcome it" - * Sunday Times *

"Powerful, unflinching . . . Part hymn to nature, part Troubles memoir . . . Vividly descriptive . . . Thin Places is at heart a survivor's story located in the real and brutally Darwinian world of lived experience" - * Guardian, Book of the Day *

"Fabulous . . . Piercingly honest, movingly heartfelt. There is so much soul and knowledge and compassion, it gave me shivers" - * Guardian, Best Books of the Year *

"The power of place to heal trauma makes for a beautiful read . . . It contains moments of great beauty . . . It is heady, bright and difficult to pin down. It is also redemptive. The Irish word for hope, we are told, is dòchas or dòigh, which holds, within its roots, glimmers of dóighiúil, the word for giving. Ní Dochartaigh takes that hope and gives it to us all" - * Big Issue *

"Ní Dochartaigh's delight in wild things weaves a thread of light through her childhood, adulthood and the book itself . . . Acutely personal . . . Wonderfully evocative . . . This heartfelt memoir, with its message on the saving grace of nature, may speak to an even wider audience than it first imagined" - * Daily Mail *

"A powerful, bracing memoir that asks what happens when a child grows up in a city that isn't safe . . . This is a book that will make you see the world differently" - * Irish Times *