Second stanza of third section (a poem called “Awaiting the Snowflakes”, written when McKee was thirteen):

Away from the harsh realities of fantasy
I walked along the shore.
The dark, choppy waters
Mirroring my thoughts.
Thoughts residing at God’s mercy
Where I fervently prayed
For anything but her missing presence.
She was silent
Knowing not to bother me
Not knowing why.

As I have previously written, I did not know Lyra McKee myself – she was six years old when I left Northern Ireland – but inevitably we had a lot of mutual friends, all of whom seem to remember her fondly. Her murder in 2019, during one of the periods when the Stormont institutions were suspended, was a low point in the Northern Ireland political process, though we have had other low points since then.

I did have a slight concern that in the process of canonising her after her tragic early death, nobody was asking the question of whether she was a good writer. I am completely reassured by this collection of essays (with a few poems); she was indeed a very good writer, eloquently articulating the feelings of young people who could not directly remember the Troubles, but whose lives were shaped by the unhappy history of Northern Ireland.

I am sure that if she had lived to curate this, she would have edited it a bit differently – there are several pieces about the high rate of suicide among young people in Northern Ireland, and other topics are touched on more than once (notably the experience of growing up gay in a traditional society). But even so, it’s a short and powerful book, and a vivid testimony to what violence can take away from us. You can get Lost, Found, Remembered here.

This was the shortest unread book on my shelves acquired in 2023. Next on that pile is The Case for Kosova, by Anna di Lellio.