In her new book, Said the Dead , Doireann Ní Ghríofa is “the Reader,” a third-person protagonist. “In the asylum edgelands, she stumbled on a ghost story,” Ní Ghríofa writes. Following clues of happenstance and augury, she seeks the details of a woman’s life: Dr. Lucia Strangman. A Victorian oddity, Lucia ran the women’s wing of a mental hospital in Ní Ghríofa’s home town of Cork, Ireland. Some patients are arguably mad, others thrashing against their circumstances. Lucia is a largely benevolent force, found in the hospital casebook’s endless descriptive lines. Through archival ephemera, Ní Ghríofa conjures moments of Lucia’s life and those of her many patients in vivid detail, giving texture to these largely forgotten lives.

Soon, Ní Ghríofa is rooting around the condemned buildings where everything took place. She pushes past broken fences and walks among graves. She begins hearing things, voices. As the veil between past and present thins, Ní Ghríofa is seen in the asylum’s halls by its 19th-century patients; the committed women speak to Ní Ghríofa from present-day moldering rooms. Periodic casebook-like lines describe Ní Ghríofa as if she were Lucia’s patient:

Wanders from home, Deserting her children On Christmas morning. Said … she heard a ghost speak at the chapel.

She had always heard voices, but, considering the lines in the hospital’s casebook, it’s clear where she—and so many others—would have found herself in a different century.

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In addition to her books, on her nightstand Ní Ghríofa has:

· My reading glasses (which I really should be wearing).

· This old candlestick is such a mess, but I am fond of it. I wrote most of Said the Dead in my car, but whenever I had to abandon my usual writing spot to write indoors, I would often light a candle to guide me. This spilled wax is all that remains of the many candles burned by this book.