All We Ever Needed: Stories

In All We Ever Needed, James F. Mulhern turns a sharp, compassionate eye toward families, lovers, teachers, children, and aging women who carry the past like a second body.

Set in Boston kitchens, Catholic households, Florida streets, classrooms, nursing homes, and seaside towns, these stories explore the strange ways people injure and rescue one another. A grandmother’s cruelty masks loneliness. A teacher’s performance of care hides something more dangerous. A lover’s betrayal opens into grief, memory, and reluctant self-knowledge.

By turns darkly funny, tender, unsettling, and deeply humane, All We Ever Needed is a literary short-story collection about family, damage, mercy, and the small, stubborn forms of grace that remain when everything else has fallen away.