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The debut author Liadan N\u00ed Chuinn is a ceasefire baby, born in 1998. Elusive and publicity-shy, their name is a pseudonym, they haven\u2019t revealed their gender and there are no pictures of them available \u2014 in other words, they are a nightmare for their publisher . Thankfully for Granta, though, these six stories don\u2019t need any biographical scaffolding \u2014 they stand strong on their own, exploring themes of inherited trauma, yes, but also illness, fertility, parenthood and love.<\/p>\n
The opening tale, We All Go, follows Jackie, a young man haunted by an event that happened a few days before his birth: when his parents were hijacked at a paramilitary checkpoint. Jackie\u2019s father, Michael, hurried out of the car, but his heavily pregnant mother, Paula, struggled to unbuckle her seat belt. The hijackers smashed her window and when she gave birth her face was still covered in tiny cuts. Jackie worries that his mother associates him with the trauma. \u201cI feel it in things,\u201d he says, \u201cas though it\u2019s not over.\u201d<\/p>\n
Nothing is over for Jackie. His father died when he was 12, after a long illness, and he can\u2019t stop thinking about it. \u201cFlesh melted off Michael Madigan\u2019s wrists and hands and fingers until his wedding band couldn\u2019t even stay on his finger.\u201d (Illness is perhaps where N\u00ed Chuinn is at their most powerful: characters in these stories suffer in excruciating detail.) Jackie\u2019s desire to excavate the past extends to asking his aunt about how the British government\u2019s internment of Michael\u2019s father and brother in the 1970s affected the family, with scant results, and even to studying anatomy at university. If only he could dissect his life and place his problems in the correct metal bowl. <\/p>\n
There is humour amid all this pain, though: N\u00ed Chuinn has a real talent for capturing a character in a single detail. In Novena, for instance, we are treated to the cringeworthy Instagram posts of a young coffee entrepreneur (\u201cLiving la vida mocha,\u201d reads one) and the rather literal perspective on prayer of a character\u2019s grandmother (\u201cSaid special prayer,\u201d reads a typical text message. \u201cYou should feel it kick in\u201d).<\/p>\n
\u2022 What we\u2019re reading this week \u2014 by the Times books team<\/b><\/a><\/p>\n Elsewhere, the humour sits somewhere between joke and tragedy. In Russia, the strongest story, a young man goes to a psychic in search of clarity about his sister, whom he hasn\u2019t seen in years (they were both adopted from Russia as infants). Meanwhile, the museum he works for is beleaguered by protesters who leave funeral flowers and angry messages (\u201cTHIS IS A DEAD BABY\u201d or \u201cLET THEM REST\u201d) next to Egyptian mummies and bog bodies. Could his sister be behind the protests? And where is she anyway? The psychic is less than helpful. \u201cI don\u2019t do missing people, mate. I should have said that at the start.\u201d<\/p>\n Four of these stories look at buried trauma in slightly oblique ways, reminiscent of the icy, controlled anger of Seamus Heaney<\/a>\u2019s North. That 1975 poetry collection perhaps marked the high point of Troubles literature, but writers working after the ceasefire (from both unionist and nationalist backgrounds) have developed new forms of expression. Look at Anna Burns\u2019s Booker-winning Milkman<\/a> (2018), for instance, which used language in constantly surprising ways. Or Michael Hughes\u2019s Country<\/a> (2018), which saw the conflict as a Homeric epic. Louise Kennedy\u2019s Trespasses<\/a> (2022) put heartbreak centre stage, while Wendy Erskine\u2019s writing, such as her recent novel The Benefactors<\/a>, might be called post-Troubles, instead focusing on new forms of division in Northern Ireland.<\/p>\n