DESCRIPTION

From Booker Prize Finalist and bestselling author of “pitch perfect” (Boston Globe) Small Things Like These, comes a triptych of stories about love, lust, betrayal, and the ever-intriguing interchanges between women and men

Celebrated for her powerful short fiction, considered “among the form’s most masterful practitioners” (New York Times), Claire Keegan now gifts us three exquisite stories, newly revised and expanded, together forming a brilliant examination of gender dynamics and an arc from Keegan’s earliest to her most recent work.

In “So Late in the Day,” Cathal faces a long weekend as his mind agitates over a woman with whom he could have spent his life, had he behaved differently; in “The Long and Painful Death,” a writer’s arrival at the seaside home of Heinrich Böll for a residency is disrupted by an academic who imposes his presence and opinions; and in “Antarctica,” a married woman travels out of town to see what it’s like to sleep with another man and ends up in the grip of a possessive stranger.

Each story probes the dynamics that corrupt what could be between women and men: a lack of generosity, the weight of expectation, the looming threat of violence. Potent, charged, and breathtakingly insightful, these three essential tales will linger with readers long after the book is closed.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Claire Keegan’s stories are translated into thirty languages. Antarctica won the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature. Walk the Blue Fields won the Edge Hill Prize, awarded to the best collection of stories published in the British Isles. Foster won the Davy Byrnes Award, one of the richest literary prizes in the world, and was last year chosen by The Times as one of the top fifty works of fiction to be published in the twenty-first century. Small Things Like These was shortlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize, and for the Rathbones Folio Prize, awarded for the best work of literature, regardless of form, to be published in the English language, and won the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year Award and the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction.

REVIEWS

A Most Anticipated Book of Fall from TIME, The Guardian, and Marie Claire

“A master class in precisely crafted short fiction . . . Keegan’s trenchant observations explode like bombshells, bringing menace and retribution to tales of romance delayed, denied, and even deadly.”—Booklist, starred review

“Compact but deep explorations of human vulnerability from a master of the form.”—Kirkus Reviews, starred review

“Exquisite . . . These pristine stories demonstrate the author’s genius for economy. Keegan says in a paragraph what other writers take entire novels to reveal.”—Publishers Weekly

“[Keegan] is a superb stylist: every well-structured paragraph contains multitudes . . . Incredibly engrossing . . . She constructs her stories from a skeleton of inferences that rise, gloriously, to form complex urges, crimes, desires, rebellions and, crucially, universal truths. Each brief work is worth the wait: Keegan is something special.”—Sunday Times (UK)

“A mini-masterpiece . . . There is nothing demonstrative about this prose, which is not spare but restrained, strategically discharging touches of eloquence only when needed, and not through a profusion of descriptive detail, but through choice adjectives and verbs that just stray from the literal . . . Keegan stands almost without rival.”—Irish Times (UK)

“Claire Keegan is known for Tardis-like narratives that are bigger on the inside . . . So Late in the Day illuminates misogyny across Irish society.”—Guardian (UK)

“Stunning.”—Marie Claire (UK)

“There aren’t enough words in the universe to fully describe quite how affecting this little book is . . . As with all of Keegan’s work the pace is perfectly measured, like a relaxed heartbeat . . . Each sentence, each word is meticulously placed . . . As always, Keegan describes the domestic quotidian in beautiful detail, elevating it – women’s work – to an art form . . . This is a treasure of a book.”—Sunday Independent (UK)