Cacophony of Bone: The Circle of a Year

"In 2019, two days after the winter solstice, Kerri and her partner, M, moved to a small, remote railway cottage in the heart of Ireland. They were looking for a home, somewhere to settle into a shared and stable life. What followed was a year of many changes. The pandemic arrived and their secluded home became a place of enforced isolation. What was meant to be the beginning of a vital and enriching new chapter was instead marked by uncertainty and fear. In many ways it was a year unlike any we had seen before, but the seasons still turned, the swallows came at their allotted time, the rhythms of the natural world went on unchecked. For Kerri there was one more change: a baby, longed for but utterly, beautifully unexpected. Fragmentary in subject and form, fluid in language, Cacophony of Bone is an ode to a year, a place, and a love that changed a life. When the pandemic came, time seemed to shapeshift; in Kerri's elegant prose, we can trace its quickening, its slowing. She maps the circle of a year-a journey from one place to another, field notes of a life-from one winter to the next, telling of a changed life in a changed world, as well as all that stays the same. All that which simply keeps on living and breathing, nesting and dying. Above all else, Cacophony of Bone is a book about home-the deepening of family, the connections that sustain us. Even (perhaps especially) the unexpected ones"--