Said the Dead by Doireann Ní Ghríofa (Signed Independent Bookshop Exclusive with Designed Edges)

In the city of Cork, a derelict Victorian mental hospital is being converted into modern apartments. One passerby has always flinched as she passes the place. Had her birth occurred in another decade, she too might have lived within those walls. Now, she notices a sign: FOR SALE. It is the first of many signs. Following them, she finds herself drawn into an irresistible river of forgotten voices, those of the women who knew this place best: insistent, vivid and true. They murmur from archives and old records; they whisper from stairwells and walls. Among them – and in one figure in particular — she may find meaning, solace, rage; her own salvation, perhaps, or her own vanishing?

A work of sublime intensity and tenderness, Said the Dead breaks the boundaries between worlds — past and present, imagined and real — to make something lasting and new: an experience full of danger, full of love and full of truth.