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.
***
“First, foremost: this is a brilliant and remarkable book, a collection of six short stories by a debut writer that immediately asks to be considered among this island’s signal 21st-century literary achievements.
… Not easy to convey in a brief review the ways in which these stories open out and close again in strange folds and planes. They operate like some theoretical shape in geometry that has more surfaces than are physically possible – they are Escher houses, Klein bottles. Or human minds, perhaps.
… The classic short story is teleological, pointed towards a single end (twist, epiphany). These short stories are anti-teleological. They are about process. They understand life and death as processes, and they represent this state of process-ness in a prose that is itself a kind of process: not finished or aphoristic or lyrical but instead associative, sometimes jagged with repetition or non sequitur, a prose that gives the past and the present an equal reality, an equal presence on the page. In this extraordinary capacity to embody process – in this context, another word for human consciousness – lies the essence of this superb book’s quietly radical realism.”
—Kevin Power, The Irish Times
“Ní Chuinn’s stories are unpredictable and memorable. While they contain the stuff of plots – family secrets, abuse, fraudulent fertility clinics and human trafficking – these aren’t their true subjects, and they almost entirely lack the resolution provided by that familiar short-story trait, the epiphany. Rather than accounts of revelation, these are reports from the knotty midst of things. They describe entanglements that cannot be ignored or consigned to history.”
—Chris Power, The Guardian
“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
“Ní Chuinn’s brilliance as a writer lies partly in their unexpected angles of approach. Never sentimental, the six tales in Every One Still Here repeatedly catch readers unawares by veering off in new directions or suddenly changing tone… Dark or deadpan humour sits alongside insights of dazzling precision and poignancy…’
– Alison Kelly, Times Literary Supplement
“Utterly brilliant… a remarkable debut… Ní Chuinn heads into the heart of the characters’ lives and sets about a delicate delineation of their most devastating emotions, delivered with tenderness and understanding in prose that is hypnotic and melodic”
– The Daily Mail
“The collection’s true force, however, is only revealed at the end. In a coda, Ní Chuinn records – in chilling, factual, present tense – the deaths of dozens of real people killed by British state forces. The painful scenes of Every One Still Here do not, as one character has it, recur by coincidence – they are the direct consequence of a political situation. This is heart-stopping writing, and I hope for more to come from the mysterious Ní Chuinn.”
– Sophie Dickinson, The Observer
