Every One Still Here — Liadan Ní Chuinn
A review of Liadan Ní Chuinn’s debut collection about inherited violence, private grief and unfinished reckoning.
157 pages · Kindle edition · 2025
Violence as Inheritance
Every One Still Here opens with grim clarity. Jackie mourns a father already lost, but the weight pressing on him comes from further back: the British state’s harassment and torture of his uncle and grandfather. Ní Chuinn writes this inheritance in a pared, almost affectless tone that allows the sadness to land cleanly. The story shows how the Troubles persist in muscle memory, in family rooms, in what goes unsaid. It sets the register for the whole collection: violence as residue, grief as something handed down rather than resolved, and a young narrator carrying a past that never gave him room to move on.
The remaining stories widen the field without breaking the mood. A fraudulent clinic poisoning a town. A woman edging between love and denial. A museum worker stalked by protests. Adopted siblings trying to place themselves in the world. Each piece stays close to private lives while political aftershocks hum beneath the surface. The prose remains stripped back and steady, which keeps the tension exposed.
By the time the final story arrives, and the coda names real civilians killed by British forces in the present tense, the book’s argument is unmistakable. Peace may have been signed, but the reckoning never finished. Ní Chuinn’s debut is unsettling, sad, and quietly furious, exactly as it should be.