Every One Still Here – Stories, by Liadán Ní Chuinn, Granta 2025, £14.99; The Stinging Fly, €12.00.
By Jenny Farrell
Liadán Ní Chuinn’s stunning short story collection is a courageous, unflinching diagnosis of an open wound. The wound is the legacy of the conflict in north of Ireland. Ní Chuinn’s genius is to move beyond the strictly political to explore its precise, cellular-level damage within the Catholic community – how violence and injustice metastasise into intergenerational trauma, dysfunction, and a failure of language, that cripple the present. This is not fiction about the Troubles; it is fiction about their endless, haunting aftermath, etched into the body and psyche.
The collection’s power derives from its relentless focus on the body as the primary site of conflict. The political violence is historical fact. Ní Chuinn shows how this historical trauma replicates itself in intimate, physical ways. We see it in the debilitating chronic pain condition that racks the mother in Amalur, a pain so total it becomes her identity. We see it in John’s drug-induced paralysis in Daisy Hill, a body literally breaking under the weight of grief it can no longer bear. The psyche’s unprocessed trauma manifests itself physically, over and over again.
This suffering is inextricably linked to the collection’s second leitmotif: the intergenerational transmission of trauma. Ní Chuinn constructs a haunting genealogy of silence and pain. The older generation in almost every story clings to corrosive silence as a survival mechanism. This failure to process and communicate – so symptomatic of trauma – becomes a festering poison that destroys them, and causes dysfunction within themselves, their families, and communities.
Dysfunction and an inability to communicate are at the collection’s heartbreaking core. Parents and children frequently cannot hear one another. Conversations are minefields of misunderstanding, deflection, and unexpressed agony. In Novena, a mother’s attempt to confess a past wrongdoing to her daughter merely deepens the chasm between them. In another story, a father can only express his love through silent companionship, asleep beside his baby son. In Amalur, even seemingly intact families can’t communicate abusive behaviour. In Daisy Hill, the crucial car argument between cousins Rowan and Shane brings this failure to a head: one seeking historical truth as an explanation for their familial pain, the other dismissing it as irrelevant “history”.
Yet, for all its stark portrayal of damage, the collection goes beyond the people it depicts. Amidst the weight of inheritance, Ní Chuinn’s characters – particularly its women – engage in a quiet, often desperate, struggle to find a way forward. The writer in Mary wrestles with fragmented memory and form, attempting to master her past through narrative and assert authorship over her own story. Tara, in Novena, through her deluded projection of an idealised online identity, is driven by a profound yearning for an alternative reality. These struggles become a form of hope, evidence of a spirit fighting to heal the open wound through acts of survival.
These struggles are framed by the collection’s potent political thesis: that this trauma grows from the violence and continuing injustice experienced by the Catholic population in the British-ruled north of Ireland. Ní Chuinn is masterful in showing how the political is devastatingly personal. The injustice is not just historical; it is the ongoing protection of perpetrators, the sealing of files until all witnesses are dead, the political rhetoric that recasts soldiers as victims. This continuous denial of justice and truth prevents healing, ensuring the wound remains open and raw, forever re-infected.
This is where the two writer figures – the woman in Mary and Rowan in Daisy Hill – represent two distinct, yet complementary, strategies for confronting this legacy. The woman is engaged in the intimate, internal struggle to articulate a selfhood after trauma. Rowan, by contrast, has moved beyond describing the internal “manifestations of trauma”; instead, he performs a radical act of testimony by simply naming the victims and the root cause: British state violence and its enduring, corrosive indifference. His writing is not about understanding the trauma for himself; it is about forcing the world to acknowledge the crime.
This progression – from the internal processing of damage to the external assignment of responsibility – gives the collection its powerful arc. It argues that true healing cannot begin with mere personal resilience; it must be preceded by a full and truthful accounting of the historical and political facts. Furthermore, by detailing these mechanisms with such precision, Ní Chuinn’s work transcends its specific context to become a testament to the experience of suppressed peoples living with the legacy of colonialism and imperialism. The “open wound” she diagnoses is recognisable in communities across the world that have endured the same patterns of violence, partition, and historical denial.
Ní Chuinn appropriately and poignantly weaves into this reflection on writing to cope with trauma, a poem by Palestinian-US author Naomi Shahib Nye and the Irish language poetry of Gearóid Mac Lochlainn. These add another significant level, expanding the scope of the author’s meaning. The importance of the Irish language in all this is underlined in the author’s choice of pseudonym, and in her Irish writing in the acknowledgements.
Finally, and intrinsically linked to this, the collection serves as an essential call for awareness across the entire island of Ireland. It challenges the Republic to fully acknowledge its own northern shadow and the shared legacy of a colonial past that has not vanished. The trauma and dysfunction depicted are not a peculiarity of the north of Ireland, but the direct inheritance of a history that shaped the whole island. Ní Chuinn’s work insists that to understand the present, in both the north and the Republic, one must confront this legacy with unflinching honesty, making it an indispensable contribution to the national conversation on both sides of the border. It is a difficult, essential, and unforgettable read that illuminates a persistent pain, and insists, fiercely, on the need and possibility of finally addressing it.
