Every One Still Here by Liadan Ní Chuinn: A hard legacy

Liadan Ní Chuinn’s debut collection comes garlanded with praise from a fistful of my favourite Irish writers including Wendy Erskine, Louise Kennedy and Lucy Caldwell, all heralding the arrival of a brilliant new talent. Every One Still Here comprises six stories, several quite brief, bookended by two lengthier pieces, all more than worthy of a mention.

Something came for him, took him, ate him up. Does it live here? Did it follow him into the city? Why am I thinking about him? It’s all like this: wasted, rotted, reedy, broke. There can be nothing rewound or undone.   

In We All Go, eighteen-year-old Jackie struggles with his anatomy classes, haunted by the loss of his father leaving him with many questions about his family interned during the Troubles. Amalur sees a young woman enchanted by her boyfriend’s warm welcoming family, swallowing her concerns about their problems and her own mother’s feelings. A woman finds herself questioning the integrity of her cab driver partner who’s turned a blind eye in return for a large fare in Mary although she may be guilty of her own form of exploitation. In Russia, a museum worker seeks help from a psychic when bouquets appear in protest at exhibits, fearing he may know who’s left them. Three people working a Saturday market have reasons to dread the exposé of a fertility clinic which conned many desperate couples in Novena. The last piece, Daisy Hill, in which a nephew is called by his distraught uncle, lost in grief for his wife, delivers a gut punch in its final pages.

You say, ‘I love you,’ because you feel that you need to say it while you still can, while it’s still true. You feel the heat of loathing inside yourself, a burn of disgust. How are you here, you think? How is this happening? How can it be that he isn’t good?  

Ní Chuinn’s stories are written in a stripped down, almost flat prose making them all the more effective. Loss, anger, grief and disappointment run through this powerful collection several of whose stories are linked by the legacy of the Troubles, most evident in the first and final pieces. Intergenerational trauma is explored through Jackie whose visceral memories of his father’s decline are interwoven with his questioning of the past while Rowan is faced with his cousin’s fury in Daisy Hill when he raises their family’s experience and its effects on both them and their parents. In Russia, the theme is extended beyond Northern Ireland as a man, adopted as a child, wonders about his and his sister’s past. Tough reading, at times, this is a striking collection, thoroughly deserving of the praise heaped upon it.

Granta Books: London 9781803513270 160 pages Paperback (read via NetGalley)