Description
Cover Image: Jacob Hamilton
Cover Design: Catherine Gaffney
A young girl spends her days on a double-decker bus. A bride-to-be prays to St Valentine’s bones. Flowers are found, left in bouquets, all over a museum. Teenagers gather to dissect the human body.
Teeming with compassion and thrumming with energy, the stories in Every One Still Here are scrupulous in their attention to detail, epic in their scope. In this bravura first collection, Liadan Ní Chuinn delivers a consummate blend of the personal and the political.
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“It’s a long time since I’ve read a short story collection where I’ve felt such an aching tenderness for the people within its pages, and at times an anger on their behalf. How brilliant it is that Liadan Ní Chuinn can render their lives in such complex, compelling ways.”
– Wendy Erskine
“An extraordinary book by an extraordinary author who refuses to look the other way. Ní Chuinn’s incantatory sentences quiver like seismographs, registering the quakes and ruptures that can crack a life in two.”
—Thomas Morris
“A phenomenal collection – these stories have a poise, a precision, an anger, a melancholy, a way of skewering things, that is entirely Ní Chuinn’s own. A formidable debut by an astonishing new voice.”
—Lucy Caldwell
“These are exceptional stories – and necessary reading, rendering lives, connections, violence, and trauma in ways that are utterly transformative.”
—Neil Hegarty
“Liadan Ní Chuinn is a phenomenal writer, with such a striking, distinctive style. Something new and startling is happening here: fiction is being rejuvenated.”
—Danny Denton
“This book creates an integrated kaleidoscope – a contradiction of course – which each of these stories manages adroitly. The local dialect of History comes teeming slowly in, shocking us with its immutable presence. And here’s a really important thing, I wanted to keep reading.”
– Evelyn Conlon
“Here’s a writer who knows how to swerve gracefully from the expected. Their work is instinctive, intriguing and truly exciting.”
– Lisa McInerney
“These are exceptional stories, stark yet richly textured and told in a voice that is at once plain-spoken and lyrical. Liadan Ní Chuinn is the real deal.”
– Louise Kennedy
