This was a curious collection of short stories, I couldn't decide whether I was enjoying the stories themselves or just the exploration of themes that linked them all together. It explored themes of fractured family relationships, particularly between parents and children or aunt/uncles and nephew/nieces.
I think my favourite story was the one about the museum workers and the fight against whoever was leaving funerary bouquets in front of skeletal exhibitions.
Many parts of this book cover aspects of the Troubles in Northern Ireland and the role that the British Government played in the devastation that took place. It was very interesting to read the interpretation here of how within one generation it moved from being a lived experience to something that's taboo to speak about. The closing chapter lists (only some I'm sure) the atrocities committed by the Armed Forces, to sit with and (in my case, at least) wonder how we can know so little of what took place. How justice was never served and how it's still not taught in schools. Lots to think about.

This is a really impressive first collection of short stories. While quite a short book, its range is impressive in terms of subject matter, narratorial perspective (mostly young, different genders) and location. The first story, 'We All Go", and the last, "Daisy Hill" are the most clearly focused on Northern Ireland and the troubles and perhaps the most powerful. "We All Go" is the more subtle of the two, "Daisy Hill' concludes with an extended, and affecting, list of victims. In between there are stories of young relationships coming apart ("Amalur") and lives falling into disappointment and self-delusion ("Novena"). This is not to say the stories are depressing - Liadan Ni Chuinn has a lightness of touch and capacity for insight that keeps stopping you short or pulling the proverbial from under your feet e.g. "I liked my boyfriend very much [...] but he was just one of the pieces of that family I adored. It was his whole family I loved. We didn't work without his family, that was the truth" ("Amalur") and the end of the same story. A splendid book.

Every One Still Here is a collection of short stories by Irish debut writer Liadan Ní Chuinn, and it is one that I will not forget soon. The prose is quiet yet intense, spellbinding the reader as they are drawn into the six stories, mostly told from the first-person perspective. Thematically, the offering is weighty: we are shown a depressed, quietly traumatised Ireland. Despite this, the stories are more moving than depressing, more enraging than numbing. I wanted to savour every sentence, yet I could not put the book down. Although the stories appear to be separate, we soon realise that they are connected by underlying themes and that some of the characters feature in more than one story.

We start with 'We All Go', the longest story by far. The protagonist is a young man studying medicine who, while beginning to dissect corpses, also starts to explore his family's past, but only encounters silence. It is an impressive story about generational trauma, the pitfalls of memory, and perhaps most importantly, what an inability to speak about violence means for the next generation.

In Amatur, the protagonist is in love with her boyfriend's family more than with him. The story revolves around the question of what family is, and explores mother-daughter relationships. The gulf between different lived realities is starkly revealed, but I also felt great sympathy for how hard some of the characters tried.

Mary is a story about a relationship under pressure, and about a woman who has lost her job and is now unsuccessfully taking a creative writing course. It explores themes of communication, guilt, frustration, economic hardship and loss.

Russia follows a young man to a psychic, where he needs to figure out what the question is he wants answered. Meanwhile, the museum where he works experiences a peculiar form of protest. This narrative focuses on belonging and community, but also touches heavily on memory, remembrance and family.

Novena is about a man and a woman who work at stalls in a market: an antiques dealer who has lost his family and a coffee cart owner who wishes for a different life. A plethora of social undercurrents and themes are revealed, not least by a teenager named Moll, who observes and judges these individuals.

And Daisy Hill is a heavy hitter right at the end, closing the distance to the first story. What starts as the story of a man who cannot stand that his dog is dying develops into a highly effective way of focusing on the often only implied trauma that runs through the other stories. Here, the violence that British soldiers inflicted on Irish society and the impact of any lack of accountability come starkly to the foreground.

Overall, this is a highly impressive and readable collection that manages to focus on certain themes without becoming perdictable, one note or overly dramatic.

I love reading short story collections and was excited to read this debut collection as I’d seen a few reviews calling the author the voice of a generation but, unfortunately, I don’t get the hype.

From the first story, the writing style infuriated me, it feels as though it was written by a child. From a lack of quotation marks (or consistency with them) to multiple adjectives given in a sentence separated by forward slashes as if it’s a choose your own adventure to create a different sentence or that the author simply hadn’t finished a final draft. It feels incomplete, ill thought out and rushed.

I was especially looking forward to Mary, a short story of a girl in a double decker bus but found myself siding with her writing group peers that the story (and the other stories within the book) weren’t fleshed out well enough.

To summarise using a quote from the book, “I know things but not the people. This is all I know, facts one-line long”. This sums this book up for me, it feels as though Liadan Ní Chuinn is trying to retell others’ stories with little to no knowledge of them and no lived experience.

Again, maybe it’s just me. I’m very grateful to have received this book to review but I simply don’t get why this debut collection is so lauded.

An astonishing collection of bold short stories. It’s quiet but urgent and so powerful- it aches of survival, trauma and conflict. The whole thing feels revolutionary, the past is the present and the final 9 pages floored me. Astounding writing. Many thanks to NetGalley and the publisher.

Liadan Ni Chuinn's debut collection is thoughtful, assured and quietly heartbreaking. The individual stories, often about quiet moments of stagnation or frustration, combine together to speak to a wider picture of life in Northern Ireland now, so many years after the Troubles but still very much in its shadow.

Unfortunately I wasn't a huge fan of all the stories individually as I found it hard on the Netgally file to tell them apart, but I was really blown away by the first and last pieces. The first story is about a young man training to be a doctor while navigating both the long illness and eventual death of his father as well as the story of a traumatic incident at a checkpoint just before the narrator's birth. The last story, which is similar in some of the themes explored, ends with a list of victims of the British soldiers.

While some stories unfortunately didn't leave much of an impression on me it is still an impressive work overall and I would definitely watch for more from Ni Chuinn.

“I believe, these things, they’re the making of us”

Quiet and devastating in equal measure, this debut collection by Liadan Ni Chuinn has lingered in my mind since I read it earlier this month. This is a collection of stories that deserves to be read in one sitting; clocking in at just over 140 pages, it’s easy enough to do, and I feel it’d enrich the reading experience significantly. Ni Chuinn has a stripped-back prose style that makes the emotion bubbling under feel all the more potent, especially in the first and last stories, which explicitly discuss Northern Ireland as it is now.

I am connected to Northern Ireland not only by living on the same island, but also by family and a deep interest in the history and culture of the place, so this collection was always one that I was going to connect with. Parts of Every One Still Here explicitly explores the trauma endured during the euphemistically-termed Troubles, but also after, calling to mind the work of Lyra McKee on the “Ceasefire Baby” generations.

But more of them are just about life in Northern Ireland, after. The stories themselves act as windows into a brief period into someone’s life; a vignette, rather than someone’s whole life story, but showing the impact of silence and trauma all the same. It’s not as grim as it sounds! There’s an odd bit of humour thrown in, and there are plenty of colourful characters throughout that add lightness and a bit of banter to a knotty, weighty collection of stories.

The last story in the collection, Daisy Hill, is an unexpected and total sucker punch. It works well at the end of the collection, leaving the reader with an uneasy feeling, and demanding that they not look away from the horrors people inflict on one another - here, or now.

3.5 Stars – Quiet and Emotional

Every One Still Here is a gentle, emotional story about grief, memory, and holding on to those we’ve lost. The writing is soft and reflective, with some beautifully written moments.

It does move a little slowly in parts, and the story can feel a bit aimless at times, but the emotion behind it is strong and real.

A good read for fans of quiet, thoughtful fiction.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC in exchange for an honest review.

I absolutely love Irish fiction, there is something about Irish authors and their ability to get to the bare bones of issues whilst still creating these complex and memorable stories.

Every One Still here is a collection of stories exploring the troubles in Ireland, betrayals, how our actions (or lack of) define us, generational trauma, anger and how we carry this through life with no direction to aim it at.

I feel like the author purposely doesn’t explain everything to us, there’s an air of mystery and although we do not have all the answers and some of the stories feel abrupt they are still hard hitting and leave you with a gut punch feeling. The author shows how silencing and blocking out takes its toll, the sadness and struggles of the families portrayed jumps off the page and you can’t help but walk away from this book feeling heavy hearted. One of the most memorable lines for me was “What would we have had if you hadn’t needed more?”

Liadan Ní Chuinn's 'Every One Still Here' is a collection of short stories that detail the emotional, social, and physical trauma the Northern Irish faced and continue to face as a result of British force and occupation. This time is often politely termed the "troubles." We have somehow made it more palatable because it makes the death and annihilation of a people more acceptable if we minimise the violence and destruction by referring to it as 'the troubles'. Within these stories, Liadan Ní Chuinn reclaims the Irish perspective from this thirty-year period so that it can't be prettied up and easily digested for people who do not want to accept the eager brutality many of the British soldiers and government exhibited.

The stories are about how silence and erasure begin to take their toll on the body because the mind cannot process the terrors it has witnessed. The book ends with true-life reports of Irish men and women murdered by British soldiers--many of whom took great pride in murdering these unarmed Irish. The courts and military higher-ups then praise these men for their bravery in handling difficult situations. 'Every One Still Here' is rough but important reading.

I haven’t read short stories for a while but had heard good things and wasn’t disappointed. It’s very brief and I really enjoyed it. I particularly enjoyed ‘Russian’ and found the final story ‘Daisy Hill’ really moving. I’d definitely recommend this to any customers interested in short stories or Irish fiction.

What an impressive debut! This is a collection of short stories and each of them feels so well realised & actualised.

Now this is sad. Every last story is sad! But they are also compassionate & there is occasional hint of humour. Being that Ní Chuinn is from the North it is local (complimentary). But then the last few pages are a sucker punch.

Cannot wait to read more from this author.

I struggled a bit with this one. I probably need to reread to.bond with the characters.

There is clearly a lot of family angst with a number of the characters and a few laughs.

‘Every One Still Here’, by Liadan Ni Chuinn, is a hard hitting debut collection of six stories.
Among the tales told there is commonly a recognition of the complex feelings of loss for family members,the struggle of sharing grief,and the lasting sense of injustice felt by those in the communities affected by some military actions in Northern Ireland,that have been ignored,rebuffed, or justified by those in positions of power.
Repeatedly in these stories there are descriptions of the dynamic within relationships that exist with other family members or friendships ,as the present is affected by sometimes unspoken elements of the past.There are frequently secrets and issues it is easier to ignore,as they are too painful to contemplate without significantly suffering of the psyche re-emerging.
This is a remarkable book that in places deals poignantly with the aftermath of immense hurt and addresses the residual pain left where those deemed responsible by some who have never had to answer for their actions.At times this is definitely not an easy read but ultimately well worth the effort,due to its impact.

Thank you to NetGalley and Granta Publications ,for an Advance Readers Copy.

I loved the first story the writing the characters.The authors style of writing is very addictive and I enjoyed each thoughtful story.#NetGalley #granata.

This is a very impressive first collection of stories from an emerging Irish talent. There were definitely stronger stories in the collection and in particular the last one which blew me away and which I have not stopped thinking about since. I would say they are slightly experimental but very readable and engaging. I’m excited to follow this authors career and see what they do next.

Every One Still Here marks an arresting debut from Liadán Ní Chuinn — a collection of six interlinked stories that navigate the quiet aftershocks of political conflict, personal loss, and intergenerational trauma. Set against the backdrop of Northern Ireland, these stories are meditative yet piercing, rendering the emotional terrain of post-conflict lives with remarkable clarity and restraint.

Ní Chuinn writes with a rare emotional acuity, her prose spare yet luminous, attentive to the unsaid as much as the spoken. Characters emerge from fractured pasts and uncertain presents, each one tethered by memory, silence, or grief. What connects them is not plot, but a mood — a shared atmosphere of reckoning and resilience.

This is not a collection that seeks easy resolution. Instead, it offers subtle revelations, echoing the persistent hum of lives still marked by what has been endured. *Every One Still Here* is a quietly devastating, beautifully controlled meditation on presence, survival, and the traces left behind.

This debut collection by Liadan Ní Chuinn contains six stories, all quietly intense, political, and through-and-through Irish. I liked the stories, though it wasn't my exact preference; this collection felt much lengthier than its 160 pages, and I didn't find myself picking it up as often compared to my other reads.

Thank you to NetGalley and Granta Publications for the ARC.

"What would we have had if you hadn’t needed more?"

A collection of six short stories, it awes me how much sense of purpose is packed unyieldingly within Every One Still Here.

The short stories here do not attempt to have so much action in a few paragraphs. Rather the opposite, it feel like we were given a peek into people’s inner lives, an episode of their day, their innermost struggles, and had we hang on a little bit more, they would still be there, likely not one silver bullet would suddenly undone their struggles, no grand arc, and while we move on to the next stories, they would still be there.

It deals with the theme of family, of where we come from. How experience and trauma are passed down to generations. The tension of how much we are defined by that experience, and how much we can separate ourselves from it. It wrestles with guilt, shame, and anger, lost in direction, not knowing where it’s supposed to go.

In We All Go, a university student is dealing with a sense of disconnect within his family and what he does, of questioning. Maybe, if we had known more, we would come to understand why we are the way we are?

In Amalur, one’s yearning for a whole, ideal family somewhat obscures the very fact that said ideal family had its own failings. Or not. If you were that lonely and alone in your home, wouldn’t you want to also have an escape of sorts?

Russia – probably my favourite - plays in two parallel narratives, of a man seeing a physics and a museum dealing with a sudden backlash and protest of their collection. It is a subtle study of how one would deal with personal guilt, and how an institution would deal with it. It also contains an exchange of what I would imagine is critical to the book: how much of ourselves can we attribute to where we come from?

The last one, Daisy Hill, is the closest to the first story in terms of how they explicitly discuss Northern Ireland and the pain and trauma inflicted during the Troubles. A 23-year-old Rowan visits his uncle John, who’s dealing with the death of his wife. Similar to Jackie in the first story, Rowan here is also questioning. TW: It contains a list of victims and how they were murdered by the British soldiers. It reminds me of an Indonesian band’s song called Jingga by Efek Rumah Kaca, which lists the victims of people’s disappearance between 1997-1998, and the date of their disappearances. To say, or perhaps scream, rejection to forget.

In 148 pages, Liadan Ní Chuinn’s debut is not one to miss.

This is a collection of short stories. It is hard to believe it is a debut.
Amalur was my favourite.
Second favourite was We All Go, but I am having a difficult time choosing my favourites, as the writing by the author is strong, touching, nuanced and there are overarching themes that connect the stories, so, you can pick favourites, but you will likely enjoy them all to different extents.
I also found the themes and topics to be quite refreshing.
Can't wait to see what the author does next.