Said the Dead Hardcover by Doireann Ní Ghríofa

Product Details

• Publisher: Knopf Canada (2026-09-22)
• Language: English
• Paperback: 360 pages
• ISBN-13: 9781039058736
• Item Weight: 430.92 grams
• Dimensions: 21.67 x 14.61 x 2.87 cm

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?

About the Author

DOIREANN NÍ GHRÍOFA is a poet and essayist. Her first prose work was A Ghost in the Throat (2020), which has been sold in twenty languages. A Ghost in the Throat was a Book of the Year in The Guardian, The Observer (London), The Irish Times, the Globe and Mail, NPR, and The New York Times. It also won Book of the Year at the Irish Book Awards, Foyles Nonfiction Book of the Year, the James Tait Black biography prize, and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and shortlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize, among other accolades. Ní Ghríofa is also the author of a number of acclaimed books of poetry, each a deepening exploration of birth, death, desire, and domesticity. She is the recipient of a Lannan Literary Fellowship, the Ostana Prize, a Seamus Heaney Fellowship, and the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature.