He finds this woman eating by herself in a hotel.

A forester mortgages his land and heads off to a seaside town looking to find a wife. That Christmas, the electricity goes out. One long haired woman moves into the priest’s house and sets his furniture on fire.

“Walk the Blue Fields” is the second short story collection and was released in 2007. This grotesque hint is typical of how these stories work, and of the odd, sometimes ruthless, world into which they open. One of the most disturbing tales in the collection, called “A Scent of Winter”, a story about rape and revenge, of keeping a white wife silent and waiting for a black man to heal. Does the au pair actually want to kill the baby? This is the question that drives “Where the Water’s Deepest”, while “Men and Women” gives voice to the desperation of being the “useful” kid to a father-tyrant: men “do nothing” at all in world in which daughter and mom do nothing except work. Taking her chance between eroticism and danger, she finds out. This debut collection of short stories is a varied, often challenging, series of reflections on the violence, and drama, of everyday lives: the love affairs which tempt men and women, to leave their marriages, the uncanny effects of requited love, the cruel rivalry between sisters, and the common misery between men and women.Įvery single time the happily married woman went away, she says in the titular story, she wondered about how it would feel to sleep with another guy.

“Antarctica” is the first short story collection and was released in 1999. “Foster” was adapted into an acclaimed movie called “The Quiet Girl”, which was released in 2022. Her stories have been published in Granta, The New Yorker, Best American Short Stories, and The Paris Reviewer, and have been translated into twenty languages.

She took an MA in Creative Writing and taught undergraduates for one year at the University of Wales.Ĭlaire has won the Rooney Prize for Literature, The William Trevor Prize, the Olive Cook Award, the Los Angeles Times Book of the Year, the Francis MacManus Award, and Davy Byrnes Irish Writing Award 2009. In 1992 she returned to Ireland, and began writing in 1994, spending a year living in Cardiff. She subsequently received an M.Phil in Trinity College Dublin. She traveled to New Orleans, at the age of seventeen and studied Political Science and English at Loyola University. Author Claire Keegan was born in the year 1968, and grew up on a farm in Wicklow, and is the youngest of a huge Catholic family.

Claire keegan new book