"This devastating début novel takes the form of an oral history about a tragedy that shatters a family. At its heart is a couple who arrived in the U.S. in the late nineteen-nineties as refugees from Afghanistan. They prospered, and brought up four children in an affluent suburb in Virginia. Rotating testimonies from people they know-family friends, a cousin, lawyers-offer theories about what led to the novel's central catastrophe."
"The stories in this début collection grapple with the Troubles, in part through an accretion of charged moments: cars are hijacked; people protest a museum's display of human remains. The names of Northern Irish civilians killed by British armed forces are listed, accompanied by frank descriptions of their deaths, for ten pages. Ní Chuinn maps tense ideas onto a strikingly varied cast of characters. As sharp details accrue stealthily in the author's subdued prose, the effect is one of chilling recognition."
Good People adopts an oral-history structure to trace a devastating catastrophe that upends a prosperous Afghan refugee couple and their four children in an affluent Virginia suburb. Rotating testimonies from family friends, a cousin and lawyers offer competing theories about what went wrong while the narrative becomes an intimate study of an Afghan immigrant community forced to reëvaluate identity and parenting in America. Every One Still Here is a debut story collection that confronts the Troubles through a buildup of charged moments, lists of civilian deaths, and restrained prose that produces a chilling recognition of historical continuities.
Read at The New Yorker
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