Every one still here Stories

Ní Chuinn debuts with an ambitious collection of six stories about fractured families, grief, and the shadow cast by the Troubles in Northern Ireland after the 1998 Good Friday Agreement. In "We All Go," medical student Jackie Madigan grapples with lingering grief over losing his father, Michael, to an illness when he was a child, and reflects on how his late paternal grandfather and uncle were "never the same" after they were interned by the British Army. "Russia," the strongest of the bunch, weaves together alternating narratives of a young Russian-born museum worker who feels guilty about the way his biological sister was treated by their adoptive family. In one, he visits a psychic to confess about not looking out for her, while in the other, protestors begin leaving elliptical messages next to exhibits of ancient human remains ("You took me from my baby"; "I am somebody's child"). The powerful closer, "Daisy Hill," follows a widower's struggles after losing his wife and siblings to an unspecified illness, which his nephew believes was somehow caused by the trauma of living under British military occupation. The story ends with a poignant series of descriptions of historical Irish civilians killed by the British Army. Readers will find it tough to shake these striking chronicles of intergenerational trauma. Agent: Tracy Bohan, Wylie Agency. (Jan.)

The past is never far away in these debut stories about Irish intergenerational trauma. Ní Chuinn (a pseudonym for a Northern Irish writer) takes up the inheritance of characters born after the Troubles, an ethnic and national conflict that took place in Northern Ireland from the 1960s to 1998. In "We All Go," the narrator Jackie's parents are carjacked, and his mother, too pregnant with him to spring from the passenger seat, goes into labor days later covered in cuts from the broken windshield. Named after his grandfather, who was interned by the British Army, Jackie longs to know more about his past, but his father is dead, and his family has no interest in reliving it, even though, the narrator explains, "they're here, inside me…things unspoken as though that makes them unseen." Elsewhere, in "Daisy Hill," John, who has already lost so much, goes to visit his uncle, who's in the process of trying to kill himself. John's interest in the past drives his contemporaries crazy, but he understands that yet another member of his family has been broken by what he survived. Here, the unseen and unspoken become visible and loud in the story's final section, which takes the form of a litany of violent acts committed by the British Army against Northern Irish children and adults. Calling these stories intricately woven doesn't do them justice. In the ones set in Northern Ireland, complex extended family relationships sew together the fabric of the fiction in surprising ways; in the stories set elsewhere, Ní Chuinn gathers loosely connected narrative threads and perspectives, using juxtaposition to create unlikely connections. Both approaches suggest that pain and loss are sewn into the cloth of families and communities and that the cost of intimacy is too often suffering. "I missed my mother," reflects the narrator of a story about named and unnamed generational violence. "Since I was a teenager, she'd broken in my shoes for me. She insisted. I had seen her feet bleed." Wholly original, quietly disquieting short fiction. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.