Walk the Blue Fields

Claire Keegan
Claire Keegan's works of fiction are critically acclaimed international bestsellers - and have been translated into more than thirty-five languages. Antarctica won the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature. Walk the Blue Fields won the Edge Hill Prize for the finest collection of stories published in the British Isles. Foster won the Davy Byrnes Award - the world's richest prize for a short story. Small Things Like These, a New York Times Best Book of the 21st Century, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the Rathbones Folio Prize and won the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction and the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year Award. So Late in the Day was published in the New Yorker and shortlisted for the British Book Awards. Keegan was awarded Woman of the Year for Literature in Ireland in 2022, Author of the Year 2023, the Seamus Heaney Award for Arts and Letters 2024 and most recently the Siegfried Lenz Prize.

Keegan's new collection of short stories shows her on impressive form... [she] is magnificent at capturing the rapturous, brimming vigour of the present and of nature. ― Observer - Paperback of the week

'Like Chekhov, Keegan has the ability to sum up a life, or a significant chunk of one, in apparently trivial, quotidian events... there is as much food for thought here as in many a novel. All the stories are set in rural Ireland. They tell of harsh, lonely lives, alleviated by drink or dreams, in a voice that is lyrical, thoughtful, but with a thick, dark strain of melancholy running through it. ― Independent on Sunday

Keegan, with her stately, rhythmic, always physical prose, adds the timing of her masters, McGahern and Trevor to her imaginative realist's art. She has a wickedly crafted assurance, subversive wit, an awareness of enduring customs and superstitions, and a sense of place. ― Irish Times

It takes a confident writer indeed to begin a collection o of short stories with the tale of a woman who is struggling to star a story. The potential pitfalls are tremendous, and it is testament to Claire Keegan's tremendous abilities that she not only doesn't falter, but also casually encapsulates the magic of her own approach... Keegan hs an eerily acute ear for dialogue, but her real gift is for what goes unsaid. Each one of her cast of priests and farmers, daughters ad wives conceals secrets: longings and frustrations that sometimes curdle and sometimes blossom in unexpected ways. Whatever the outcome, these are exquisite stories, so intricately wrought, so strange and beguiling as the entirely bewitch. ― Guardian