Liadan Ní Chuinn - Every One Still Here (Granta, 2026) ****

Liadan Ní Chuinn is a brilliant story-teller. For each of the six stories in this book, 'they' find a singular voice and angle of approach that gives the narrative poignancy and directness, authenticity and the possibility to relate to the main character. 

And this is despite the fact that all of the stories are characterised by highly unusual subject matter: a Protestant hijacking of a Catholic family’s car, which takes place while the first-person narrator, Jackie, is still in the womb; a museum in which a “disrupter” lays floral tributes beside exhibits of human remains; and a medical-school dissection class where students cut into human bodies with scalpels while grappling with questions of consent: “But did they know that they weren’t going to stay whole? But did they sign that their head could be taken off at the neck?” In another story, terminal illness gradually reduces a beloved husband to bodily fluids, lumps, and a contorted, collapsing skeleton. Yet this physical deterioration does not diminish his wife’s devotion. She continues to care for him with almost ritualistic tenderness, shaving him, trimming his fingernails and ear hairs, bathing him with coconut oil, and tending to his increasingly fragile body; in the last story, another male character, Rowan, angrily defends his preoccupation with British soldiers’ actions in Ulster, arguing back against a friend who sees fault on both sides and wants to consign the Troubles to the past

“I’m sick of this, right, Rowan?” his cousin Shane says. “It happened, right? It happened, two sides, either side, both, it happened, it stopped.
I hate that, says Rowan. It’s not both sides, it’s not either side, it’s this huge fucking army, it’s this huge fucking state, this government that does whatever it wants, that just, that, they can kill us, and kill us.”

But first and foremost, all the characters are human, people with clear context, emotions and carefully defined personalities, people you can relate to. Despite the often heavy situations in which they end up, there is still room for humour and the relative nature of life: 

A psychic asks her client why he’s come. "Aren’t you supposed to know? he answers. “The psychic says: Everyone, no word of a lie, every single person says that. You’ve, none of youse, you’ve no concept of how this works.”

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