KERRI NI DOCHARTAIGH’S Thin Places comes in on a tidal wave of nature books. Alarm at the speed of destruction of the natural world has set many writers to work and many publishers to spot a market.

Described as “a mixture of memoir, history and nature writing,” Ni Dochartaigh in this, her first book, turns to wild places and animals as a form of psychic escape.

It is the traumatic legacy of the Northern Ireland Troubles that creates the constantly unsettled fugitive, finding balm in the wild swimming she loves, in rivers, lakes and seas flowing through what she calls “thin places.”

“Conglomewriting,” is how poet Paul Muldoon terms it, inclining “towards the amalgam, the tendency for one event or character to bleed into another” and Ni Dochartaigh uses that idea explored by Muldoon in his book.

Such an imagined Ireland, existing between the realm of the real and the mystical, is found in Irish literature from ancient times to Joycean modernism.

It is evoked out of landscape and the subtleties of a lost language — the thin veil between the present moment and the timelessness of an ancient place.

Ni Dochartaigh’s notion of thin places comes tangled up in Celtic mysticism, with a flourish of etymology around Irish nouns and placenames.

More gripping is her understanding of the hard reality of human relations scarred by trauma so destructive it makes words impossible.

Ni Dochartaigh’s depiction of 1980s Derry is clearly influenced by recent literature. Anna Burn’s stunning achievement, the Booker prize-winning, Milkman is suggested at times, though unacknowledged, alongside excerpts from Seamus Heaney and Max Porter’s Grief is a Thing with Feathers is also drawn on.

In the latter half of the book, we learn that Ni Dochartaigh goes into therapy to try to reach down to the closed-off regions of her mind and a sense emerges perhaps of “thin places” as the veil between life and seductive death comes into view. In this regard, the book has a therapeutic function.

Thin Places is published by Canongate, £14.99.