DENSE….with strange endings — unsettling and or intriguing endings - brilliant prose — and (for me) —AT LEAST not as excruciating devastating as the title story. C.K. tells stories about ordinary people, with whom we can meet and live together at any moment of our lives, in any part of the world, but who are subjected to extraordinary, stressful and oppressive situations. Her writing style is loose, light and uncompromising in its simplicity and beauty, in the spirit it embodies and the memories it stirs up, with the result that with a narrative as rich as this one, every sentence matters and has an impact on the overall effect. ( All good writing is suggestion; bad writing is statement,...) These] stories ... show Keegan to be an authentic talent with a gimlet eye and a distinctive voice." -- Amanda Heller, The Boston Globe

Or take another story - 'The Singing Cashier' - the elder girl, has lustful relations with the postman and sends her younger sibling out of the house on made-up errands, while she does the 'dirty'. Later in the story, news of a serial murder's house - just down the street, and the elder one makes a swift decision, knowing she has to protect her sister. It's real-life, a sudden jostling of priorities. Read about the Faber story, find out about our unique partnerships, and learn more about our publishing heritage, awards and present-day activity.You’ll come across this line in the fifth story in this collection and think, ah, is that what we’re doing then. Or so I did. The first third or so of the collection is a sketchbook of scenarios featuring women and girls trying to find escape from unhappy, oppressive family life and in the course of such seeming to jump from the frying pan into the fire. A married woman sleeps with a stranger and ends up handcuffed to his bed, gagged, a prisoner. A woman falls in love with a married man who spurns her and spends a decade doing a Miss Havisham. A young teenage girl seduces her family’s farmhand and he goes and hangs himself from the guilt, her discovering his soiled dead body. Being clearly a superior writer Claire Keegan has a unique, natural and original voice. The discovery of her short stories (advised by my GR friend s.penkevich) was a truly pleasant surprise.

Ireland and the Magdalene Laundries: A Campaign for Justice by Katherine O’Donnell. A non-fiction documentation of the ongoing work carried out by the Justice for Magdalenes group in advancing public knowledge and research into Magdalene laundries.

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The story that made me cry was “Passport Soup,” about a man who loses his daughter in a field, and whose wife can never forgive him. Told from the guy’s point of view, just crushing, hopeless grief. A word of warning: several of these tales include themes that might be considered disturbing. The initial story scared the bejesus out of me! And while this was not my favorite read by this author to date, there is no denying that it is beautifully done. The women and girls who were unwillingly held were often described as ‘fallen women’. They tended to be unmarried mothers and their daughters, those who had grown up in church or state care, women with mental health issues or disabilities and those who had suffered sexual abuse. Irish author Claire Keegan nominated for prestigious Booker Prize". TheJournal. 7 September 2022 . Retrieved 9 September 2022.

The characters in these unsettling tales are all damaged in some way. Broken marriages, grief, loneliness - these are some of the subjects that have emerged to upend their lives. Most of the stories are set in Ireland, and to be honest the few that take place elsewhere are a bit jarring. Keegan's writing feels much more natural and assured in her native land. Suddenly I don’t want you, won’t keep you away from the boys and your smoky snooker nights. I’ll drink this parting glass, but at the end of the night I’ll shake your hand. I’ll be damned if I’ll snare you like a fox, live with you that way, look into your eyes some night years from now and discover a man whose worst regret is six furtive nights spent in his mother’s bed with a woman from a Christmas do. Suddenly I wonder why I came. In a transfixing appearance on American TV twelve years ago, Keegan invoked caution and reluctance when speaking about her writing and said she was suspicious of any idea that presented itself to her with excitement. Hers was unlike any other interview with an author I’ve seen. Motionless, concentrated and pragmatic, she extended to her creations the sort of courteous interest one might take in a young cousin. Nothing about self-expression. Yet an absolute correspondence between her presence and her fiction. From 1922 until 1996, thousands of girls and women were held prisoner in ‘Magdalene laundries’ in Ireland. These workhouses were commercial and profit-based laundries run and funded by the Catholic Church and the state.Gilmartin, Sarah (24 October 2021). "Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan: a timely and powerful book". The Irish Times . Retrieved 25 January 2022. If the mother superior’s story is left untold, so is that of the girl found shivering in the coal shed. “I’m not saying she isn’t a person,’ says Keegan. “I’m saying that the book isn’t her story. And maybe that’s deeply appropriate, because so many women and girls were peripheral figures. They weren’t central. Not even to their own families, not even to their own parents.” Photograph: Murdo MacLeod/The Guardian ‘I’m not somebody who finds it difficult to make work’ … Claire Keegan

As near to an epic as the collection contains, ‘The Forester’s Daughter’ is flanked by two slighter stories, ‘Dark Horses’ and ‘Close to the Water’s Edge’. The former, a Francis Mac Manus Award winner, is a brief and gutting tale of a man who has lost everything through his own intransigence and emotional ignorance. Brady, its protagonist, is a twenty-something farmhand, wallowing in self-hatred and self-denial after ‘the woman’ dispenses with his rural passive-aggressiveness. Rougher than any Macra na Feirme poster-boy, Brady is in many ways the prototypical Deegan, beset financially despite his deep, misguided love for country ways. Ironically, he could not be more different from the young man at the centre of ‘Close to the Water’s Edge’, a Harvard student spending his birthday at his millionaire stepfather’s apartment. Set on the Texas coast ‘Close to the Water’s Edge’ represents the only tonal misstep in the collection. Despite the display of Keegan’s usual poetic precision, the story seems out of place in a collection so resolutely Irish. A brief piece too, by the time we have adjusted to the American idiom and setting it is over, and we are immediately plunged into the 1940s Ireland of ‘Surrender’.On the other - hand my absolute favourite, 'Sisters', set in Ireland, is completely real. It's what you might designate the perfect short story; a small list of characters, a glorious setting, a rivalry and a very satisfactory revenge, where the unattractive sister is able to restore to herself, what should be hers by right. My second favourite was 'Love in the Tall Grass', a love affair, a break-up and a promise made with a rather unusual and satisfying, but at the same time unresolved ending. Keegan is measured and merciless as she dissects the silent acquiescence of a 1980s Irish town in the Church’s cruel treatment of unmarried mothers - and the cost of one man’s moral courage. To submit to an analysis, Claire Keegan's "Antarctica" was, for me, a frustratingly complex task. Keegan's tales are at once simple and clear while being extremely complex in their implicit subliminal messages. And when we have a compact and coherent collection without any weakness, in my opinion, the task of producing a critique or review is all the more thorny and difficult to accomplish.