Excerpt from Every One Still Here by Liadan Ní Chuinn, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

We All Go

1

My parents were hijacked before I was born. It was just before, two nights prior. I think it's important. I don't know why. They were driving out of the city on a road that got narrow, a bad artery, and then they were stopped in the road by a clot: people with masks and crowbars. My dad was driving so it was my dad who braked.

The people in the road yelled: GET OUT OF THE CAR.

My dad said: Paula. (That was all that he said. He wasn't good at reassurance; when the dog died, he was supposed to break it to us gently, but we said: How is he? and he said: Dead.)

The people with the crowbars yelled: GET OUT OF THE FUCKING CAR.

My dad got out. One of the people took his wallet and checked his ID. (They wanted to be sure they were only hijacking Catholics. His licence said Michael Madigan so they took the car.)

The people with the crowbars yelled: What the fuck is she doing?

My mum hadn't got out. She was very pregnant with me. The seat belt had locked tight against her, and she couldn't find the belt's plug in the darkness. Her breathing was horrible. She was very scared.

My mum maybe said: Michael, or maybe: I'm stuck. She didn't say anything that could be heard. The men with the masks moved in close. They smashed in the windscreen.

My mum didn't scream but tiny bits of glass bit into her face and her neck. She thought she might never move again but then the seat belt finally gave and she moved like she was melting. My dad took her over to the side of the road. They stood by the hedge where blackberries grow, and badgers bleed out, and the guys with the crowbars drove off in the car. My mum and dad stood in the dark. The night was very cold. It was before mobile phones but my mum wouldn't let them stop at a house to use someone's landline. She was too scared.

I was born two nights later. In the photos I am pink and Michael Madigan is smiling and my mum has those cuts all over her skin, just scabbing, something like co-ordinates/freckles.

It was my dad who told us about the hijacking. He said it was because of tensions at the time: the Orange Order wanted to march through communities that didn't want them. He had determined that this was what it was about because of the hijackers' timing/location/target. My mum's never mentioned it. If it were up to her, we wouldn't know. I only have what my dad told me. (He died when we were starting to be proper people: Bernie was eight and I was twelve.) So I say she was scared, my mum, stuck in the car. I say she thought she might never move again. But I can't know it. She's never told me.

I see that hijacking everywhere. I think it's important. I don't know why. I feel it in things, as though it's not over. I feel it in the rules that she has. I see it in the way that we live. It's in what she thinks is progressive. She says she wouldn't give us Irish names. She won't let us wear GAA stuff into town. I don't know how to explain it. I see it in her. Bernie talks about the twenty-six counties and the six but my mum, she says Down South, meaning the Republic, meaning the Free State, meaning (depending on where exactly we are) locations at each cardinal point: East, South, North, West. (It bothers us both but Bernie's more straightforward. She says: You're a partitionist, Paula!)

I feel it in the way my mum loves Bernie (fervid, uncomplicated) and the way she sees me (holds me apart).

She has this distance. She says, over the sound of the TV: Jackie, where is it you're away to? She says, she asks me during an ad: Jackie, do you have a girlfriend? and she has to wait for the answer because she really doesn't know/she hasn't noticed/she can't tell.

I don't think that she blames me. That would be stupid. But I wonder about it. I think it's important. If she hadn't been pregnant, she could have got out of the car. The glass wouldn't have cut her. She wouldn't've bled. If she hadn't been pregnant, she wouldn't have been stuck on her own in the dark, watching the men in the masks come closer. She wouldn't have seen Michael Madigan get out of the car and leave her in it. She wouldn't have stood in the cold on bloated, swollen feet. I was in her lap. I was almost born.

Excerpted from Every One Still Here by Liadan Ní Chuinn. Copyright © 2026 by Liadan Ní Chuinn. Excerpted by permission of FSG Originals. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.