RaveRTÉ (IRE)\"While Ní Ghríofa’s new book, Said the Dead, is every bit as formally promiscuous as her first, the author has made several refinements to her style in the intervening years. The incessant chattering of ghosts feels like a feat of literary alchemy, and the time-fluid way that Ní Ghríofa dramatizes the hidden history of a women’s mental institution in Cork feels more akin to Virginia Woolf’s Orlando than to anything written by Sebald ... philosophical without being cold-hearted, immersed in history without being conservative, emotionally generous without being sentimental, and quietly furious without being didactical. Doireann Ní Ghríofa is surely one of our most important writers, and it does both her and us an immense disservice to tether her work to anything other than its own phenomenology.\
