Sky Ground Sky
Sky Ground Sky, published 13th May 2026.
298 pages. Soft cover. Limited edition.
Cover design by Adrian Robb.
IBSN: 978-1-7397749-5-0.
Sky Ground Sky is a personal narrative that explores how landscape and culture create individuals, and how our relationship with the world can ultimately redeem us.
A cabin building project beside two silver birch trees becomes the ground for reckoning with the past. The building process itself reflects a journey through place and body, an enquiry into how we can live and grow with our own history, and that of the land.
It is a shapeshifting narrative that moves through poetry, childhood perception, lyric essay, travel writing and playful anecdote.
From a childhood between East Clare and London to years travelling across Southern Europe, Australia, Mexico and Indonesia, Sky Ground Sky describes communal experiences in various pockets of the earth. It explores belonging in the blurring of time and change, where memories pass through crumbling ground.
The narrative constantly arrives where the boundaries between self and nonself begin to fray. It explores how we can surpass our own stories and move further into presence.
Laced with dust, streams, cracks, roots, dreams, waterfalls, strangers and stranger places, landscapes both pretty and painful, the book uses elements of landscape as metaphor and offers a vision of healing in transience.
The suspense lies in the tension between reality and wish, love and pain, longing and letting go.
Through prose both intimate and expansive, it explores the complex interplay between family and home, body and mind, hierarchical systems and communal experiences.
Sky Ground Sky is a celebration of creativity, companionship and the vulnerability of being human.
Reviews:
“We cannot fit a life into a book, we cannot write a feeling’, muses Ailbhe Wheatley in her gorgeous, mindful, and at times, heart-rending memoir, Sky Ground Sky. A book that gently led me back to the yoga mat and stirred up dreams in me of travel and surrendering to the unconditional kindness found in both nature and strangers.
At times, I felt deep sadness on behalf of Wheatley, who is one of our most compassionate writers in contemporary Ireland…
Sky Ground Sky is an unforgettable and mature work of forgiveness and reconciliation. It examines complicated familial relationships, while holding a magnifying glass to the warmth of strangers and the joy found in community. This is a book for anyone frustrated by a disconnected world; it invites you to embrace your own ‘messy and unpredictable’ healing, and to trust in the process of ‘falling forwards, growing back.” — Molly Twomey, author of ‘Chic to be Sad’.
“A fierce and deeply attentive debut that treats memory like landscape and the body like weather.
Some memoirs aim to tell you what happened. Sky Ground Sky is doing something far more ambitious. Ailbhe Wheatley is not simply recounting a life. She is mapping consciousness as it moves through memory, land, illness, family, and the long, complicated process of returning to oneself. The result is a book that feels less like a traditional narrative and more like a living terrain. It shifts between childhood perception, adult reflection, travel, physical collapse, and the slow reassembly of identity with a kind of intuitive intelligence that mirrors the way memory actually works” — Summer Stewart, publisher at Unsolicited Press.
“Ailbhe has woven, layered and excavated a memoir that evokes the landscapes - both real and emotional - that she describes with lucidity and sensory accuracy. With language that reads like ritual and poetry while being as clear and grounding as cold water, Sky Ground Sky is a wandering, deeply textural work that treats time, body, memory and landscape as one living breathing ecology. This work is a blend of eco-poetry, memoir, psychogeography and personal exploration that shapeshifts and time travels through the various terrains of memory, and is a work that is felt and experienced as well as read.
I felt deeply enchanted and moved by this book….
Sky Ground Sky captures the feeling of being both lost and found at once, and reminds us that we are often redeemed through shared presence, attention and creative witnessing.”
“Sky Ground Sky unfolds like memory itself… nonlinear, bruised and full of light. It is a feral and tender memoir, half secret, half song.”
A little more about….
I began writing this book in 2018 as a way of 'making sense' of time as it moved me: transient, ethereal, embodied and always. What began as a personal reclamation of my voice became a creative act of remembering, forgetting, and remembering again, a constant retrieval of the senses, away from all the noise and non-sense. This book is about the healing power of community and the ground we walk upon. The act of writing my life as it passed was embodied yet disembodied enough it proved able to balance the tides and salt my eyes, taking me safely away from ‘the moment’ as it edged me ever closer toward it. This book was written on the back of buses, bushes, scribbled down at dawn in my note book or app, midnight sleepless hostel dorm rooms, bustling cafes, crowded city streets, alone in my own head and full of cares, but also full of the raw pulsation of everything - the past and present iridescent, colours passing by the train-wreck, the sensation of falling, the silent music spinning out of it all…
Sky Ground Sky, published 13th May 2026.
298 pages. Soft cover. Limited edition.
Cover design by Adrian Robb.
IBSN: 978-1-7397749-5-0.
Sky Ground Sky is a personal narrative that explores how landscape and culture create individuals, and how our relationship with the world can ultimately redeem us.
A cabin building project beside two silver birch trees becomes the ground for reckoning with the past. The building process itself reflects a journey through place and body, an enquiry into how we can live and grow with our own history, and that of the land.
It is a shapeshifting narrative that moves through poetry, childhood perception, lyric essay, travel writing and playful anecdote.
From a childhood between East Clare and London to years travelling across Southern Europe, Australia, Mexico and Indonesia, Sky Ground Sky describes communal experiences in various pockets of the earth. It explores belonging in the blurring of time and change, where memories pass through crumbling ground.
The narrative constantly arrives where the boundaries between self and nonself begin to fray. It explores how we can surpass our own stories and move further into presence.
Laced with dust, streams, cracks, roots, dreams, waterfalls, strangers and stranger places, landscapes both pretty and painful, the book uses elements of landscape as metaphor and offers a vision of healing in transience.
The suspense lies in the tension between reality and wish, love and pain, longing and letting go.
Through prose both intimate and expansive, it explores the complex interplay between family and home, body and mind, hierarchical systems and communal experiences.
Sky Ground Sky is a celebration of creativity, companionship and the vulnerability of being human.
Reviews:
“We cannot fit a life into a book, we cannot write a feeling’, muses Ailbhe Wheatley in her gorgeous, mindful, and at times, heart-rending memoir, Sky Ground Sky. A book that gently led me back to the yoga mat and stirred up dreams in me of travel and surrendering to the unconditional kindness found in both nature and strangers.
At times, I felt deep sadness on behalf of Wheatley, who is one of our most compassionate writers in contemporary Ireland…
Sky Ground Sky is an unforgettable and mature work of forgiveness and reconciliation. It examines complicated familial relationships, while holding a magnifying glass to the warmth of strangers and the joy found in community. This is a book for anyone frustrated by a disconnected world; it invites you to embrace your own ‘messy and unpredictable’ healing, and to trust in the process of ‘falling forwards, growing back.” — Molly Twomey, author of ‘Chic to be Sad’.
“A fierce and deeply attentive debut that treats memory like landscape and the body like weather.
Some memoirs aim to tell you what happened. Sky Ground Sky is doing something far more ambitious. Ailbhe Wheatley is not simply recounting a life. She is mapping consciousness as it moves through memory, land, illness, family, and the long, complicated process of returning to oneself. The result is a book that feels less like a traditional narrative and more like a living terrain. It shifts between childhood perception, adult reflection, travel, physical collapse, and the slow reassembly of identity with a kind of intuitive intelligence that mirrors the way memory actually works” — Summer Stewart, publisher at Unsolicited Press.
“Ailbhe has woven, layered and excavated a memoir that evokes the landscapes - both real and emotional - that she describes with lucidity and sensory accuracy. With language that reads like ritual and poetry while being as clear and grounding as cold water, Sky Ground Sky is a wandering, deeply textural work that treats time, body, memory and landscape as one living breathing ecology. This work is a blend of eco-poetry, memoir, psychogeography and personal exploration that shapeshifts and time travels through the various terrains of memory, and is a work that is felt and experienced as well as read.
I felt deeply enchanted and moved by this book….
Sky Ground Sky captures the feeling of being both lost and found at once, and reminds us that we are often redeemed through shared presence, attention and creative witnessing.”
“Sky Ground Sky unfolds like memory itself… nonlinear, bruised and full of light. It is a feral and tender memoir, half secret, half song.”
A little more about….
I began writing this book in 2018 as a way of 'making sense' of time as it moved me: transient, ethereal, embodied and always. What began as a personal reclamation of my voice became a creative act of remembering, forgetting, and remembering again, a constant retrieval of the senses, away from all the noise and non-sense. This book is about the healing power of community and the ground we walk upon. The act of writing my life as it passed was embodied yet disembodied enough it proved able to balance the tides and salt my eyes, taking me safely away from ‘the moment’ as it edged me ever closer toward it. This book was written on the back of buses, bushes, scribbled down at dawn in my note book or app, midnight sleepless hostel dorm rooms, bustling cafes, crowded city streets, alone in my own head and full of cares, but also full of the raw pulsation of everything - the past and present iridescent, colours passing by the train-wreck, the sensation of falling, the silent music spinning out of it all…