Said the Dead
You must sign in to see if this title is available for request. Sign In or Register Now
Send NetGalley books directly to your Kindle or Kindle app
1
To read on a Kindle or Kindle app, please add kindle@netgalley.com as an approved email address to receive files in your Amazon account. Click here for step-by-step instructions.
2
Also find your Kindle email address within your Amazon account, and enter it here.
Pub Date Sep 22 2026 | Archive Date Sep 22 2026
Talking about this book? Use #SaidtheDead #NetGalley. More hashtag tips!
Description
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.
A Note From the Publisher
Advance Praise
“A haunting, visionary act of witness; this book will be read for decades to come.” —Anne Enright, author of The Wren, The Wren
“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
“Doireann Ní Ghríofa goes to a place where the veil thins and the worlds meet, and crosses over, and returns, again and again, with living stories of the dead. You can feel the bravery of these acts of psychic trespass, and their sincerity makes for a mysterious and beautiful and thoroughly absorbing book, which continues to reverberate long after you finish it.” —Lucy Caldwell, author of These Days
“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, author of Rapture’s Road
“Said the Dead is an audacious book that refuses to be anything but its own irreducible self. It is part narrative non-fiction, part poem, part novel, part work of eccentric and ecstatic scholarship. Like much of the best writing, though, it makes a mockery of the idea of genre categorisation. Doireann ní Ghríofa remains a unique presence in Irish literature; as a reader, I would follow her into any darkness.” —Mark O’Connell, author of Bond, Queer Bond
“There’s magic in this one—a hauntingly beautiful and vivid and necessary book.” —Kevin Barry, author of The Heart in Winter
Available Editions
| EDITION | Other Format |
| ISBN | 9780374618247 |
| PRICE | $29.00 (USD) |
| PAGES | 368 |
Available on NetGalley
Average rating from 18 members
Featured Reviews
Sarah J, Reviewer
Said the Dead is one of those books that's nearly impossible to categorize. Is it fiction? Is it memoir? History? Fantasy? All of the above? The person telling the story (at times described using the first person and at times called simply "the Reader") comes across a former mental hospital being redeveloped into condos. Exploring some of the grounds and buildings, she feels a strange connection, which leads her to seek out the archives of the institution. There she comes across the unusual history of Lucia Strangman, one of the first female doctors to work with the mentally ill, and becomes obsessed with her case notes. The Reader becomes so immersed in the stories of the women who Lucia treated -- so often committed to the hospital not because they were truly ill but because they were at the mercy of men in their life or because they didn't fit in with the society of the time or simply due to extreme poverty -- that she often neglects her own life and family. The narrative is interspersed with haunting images of Lucia, her family, and some of her patients, and throughout there is a mysterious commentary to one side that suggests that as the Reader is somehow watching the lives of these patients unfold, someone is watching her. There is a dreamlike quality to the book, and there's never a clear sense of what is real and what is fiction, but overall there's an immense respect for the many women whose names and lives were utterly forgotten in time. As soon as I finished the book, I wanted to go back to the beginning and read it again, certain there was so much I missed.
Thank you to NetGalley and Farrar, Straus and Giroux for providing me with a digital ARC of this book in return for an honest review. This book will be published September 22, 2026.
Liz H, Reviewer
A real shame this wasn't on the Booker longlist because it belongs there. This book had me from the opening line - it began with a mistake. From that moment, I was hooked. Once I realized what Ghrifofa was doing through these archives, I cancelled all plans to finish this book. Everything feels alive in this - from the objects, the sentences, the dead, its all alive. Her commentary is cutting about sanity and desirability and the ending left me with full body chills.
Readers who liked this book also liked:
