Walk the Blue Fields

Product Information

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

Now you stand on the landing trying to remember happiness, a good day, an evening, a kind word.’ - from ’The Parting Gift’ In spare and exact strokes, Keegan transforms these domestic circumstances into universal mirrors. Easy to devour in a single sitting but likely to haunt you for years.” — Oprah Daily, Best Short-Story Collection of 2023 Reading Irish-born Claire Keegan is like succumbing to a drug: eerie, hallucinogenic, time-stopping. Her simplest sentences envelop the brain (and all the senses) in a deep, fully dimensional dream . . . Each story is as substantive as a novel, and as breathtaking . . . Unforgettable.” — San Francisco Chronicle Claire Keegan’s brilliant debut collection, Antarctica, was a Los Angeles Times Book of the Year, and earned her resounding accolades on both sides of the Atlantic. Now she has delivered her next, much-anticipated book, Walk the Blue Fields, an unforgettable array of quietly wrenching stories about despair and desire in the timeless world of modern-day Ireland.

Keegan’s output is scarce and her stories are as spare as they are heartrending, whittled down to the essential. If she has published anything that isn’t perfect, I haven’t seen it… More than most books four times its size, Foster does several of the things we ask of great literature: It expands our world, diverting our attention outward, and it opens up our hearts and minds. This is a small book with a miraculously outsized impact.”— NPR The austere style and measured pacing of “Foster” is perfect… [A] matchless novella.”— Wall Street Journal These magnificent stories are like a smoothly sanded wood surface, all paint stripped away to show the natural growth of the timber, the glowing colour of the tree's inner life, the bare truth without overblown decoration. Bauhaus, not Baroque. Seven perfect short stories” from the award-winning author of Antarctica—“a writer who is instinctively cherished and praised” ( The Guardian, UK).

These short fictions by the Irish author Claire Keegan haven’t a style so much as a microclimate, a chill mist blowing in on a hard wind off the sea. . . . The author’s own storytelling powers have darkened and matured since her first collection, as she takes confident command of her craft.” –Amanda Heller, The Boston GlobeAstonishing and beautiful. Her writing is intimately tuned to the landscape, language and ancient storytelling tradition of Ireland. . . . With a few crisp stark sentences, she opens whole worlds into which her reader falls, fully enthralled, captivated and amazed until her very last word.” –Alice Greenway, author of White Ghost Girls

Reading these stories is like coming upon work by Ann Beattie or Raymond Carver at the start of their careers.”— Los Angeles Times Book Review In stories brimming with Gothic shadows and ancient hurts, Claire Keegan tells of “a rural world of silent men and wild women who, for the most part, make bad marriages, and vivid, uncomprehending children” (Anne Enright, The Guardian). In the never-before-published story “The Long and Painful Death,” a writer awarded a stay to work in Heinrich Böll’s old cottage has her peace interrupted by an unwelcome intruder, whose ulterior motives only emerge as the night progresses. In the title story, a priest waits at the altar to perform a marriage and, during the ceremony and the festivities that follow, battles his memories of a love affair with the bride that led him to question all to which he has dedicated his life; later that night, he finds an unlikely answer in the magical healing powers of a seer.Lccn 2007408869 Ocr_converted abbyy-to-hocr 1.1.20 Ocr_module_version 0.0.17 Old_pallet IA17314 Openlibrary_edition Hope lurks somewhere in almost all [Keegan’s] stories. . . . You start out on the paths of these simple, rural lives, and not long into each, some bit of rage or unforgivable transgression bubbles up . . . Then the truly amazing happens: Life goes on, limps along, heads for some new chance at beauty.” –Susan Salter Reynolds, Los Angeles Times Book Review