Hanna Greally spent the best part of the 1940s and 1950s incarcerated in a psychiatric hospital in the Irish Midlands. In Birds Nest Soup she recounts with vivid detail the terrible suffering she endured there. Though mentally well, and accepted as such by the authorities, she was condemned to life in an atmosphere calculated to bring about the steady degradation of the person. But Hanna lived to tell this remarkable and poignant tale of survival