Why read The Celestial Realm?

Book cover of The Celestial Realm

Book description

"Phil doesn't like physical affection. She doesn't love you because you don't exist. She doesn't care if you have something important coming up. A busy week, a daunting appointment, a divorce, because she believes the world is going to end in the morning. Every morning."

Having grown up visiting her…

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Why read it?

1 author picked The Celestial Realm as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Niamh Campbell

Author

A non-fiction recommendation this time, and a recent release.

Hennigan’s essay collection is a beautifully written account of the final years, and opaque recollections, of her grandmother Phil, who spent much of her life in various psychiatric institutions.

I have been interested in this theme for years – Ireland, in the first decades after independence from Britain, has some of the highest rates of citizen incarceration in the world: prisons, borstals, orphanages, magdalen laundries, and psychiatric hospitals both provided employment and regulation and also kept a whole population of ‘problem’ people out of sight).

This fact, and its repercussions in…

From Niamh's list on capturing the haunted geography of Dublin.