After the Troubles: Liadan Ní Chuinn’s phenomenal debut

Every One Still Here, the first short story collection by Northern Irish writer Liadan Ní Chuinn, is something of a mystery. The name is a pseudonym and the book comes with no author photograph: all we are told is that they were born in 1998, the year of the Good Friday agreement. But, reading Ní Chuinn’s work, one thing quickly becomes clear: this is a phenomenal debut.

The opening story, We All Go, follows Jackie, a student stultified by both a claustrophobic home life and the anatomy classes they attend at university. Ní Chuinn’s prose is austere and precise: a technician places a body’s “white fascia and curds of yellow fat” into a bowl, while the narrator feels queasy. It is a tale of disconnections – physical and emotional. Jackie’s mother, seemingly, has no sympathy for her: the heaviness of one is inexpressible to the other.

This pattern is repeated throughout. In Amalur, a young girl confides her pregnancy to a family friend, unable to tell anyone else. In Novena, a fraudulent fertility clinic leaves a Northern Irish town divided and reeling.

In Mary, written in the second person, “you” join a writing class after being made unemployed. Among the regular passengers on the bus to the class is a child named Mary, who the protagonist tries and fails to commit to paper. The tutor asks: “Is she a character? Or is she a metaphor?” This is a post-Troubles world, in which trauma lingers in every interaction: rendering it in fiction is a fraught, complicated task.

Ní Chuinn’s scenes are filled with shattered glass, broken bones, cannulas, needles, desperate ambulance rides. By the final story, Daisy Hill, we are braced for terrible events. A character is slumped on the floor, and here is yet another uncle, brother or father to mourn.

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.

Every One Still Here by Liadan Ní Chuinn is published by Granta (£14.99). Order a copy from The Observer Shop for £13.49. Delivery charges may apply

Photography by Olivier Martel for Getty Images