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Published Nov 2023
128 pages
Genre: Short Stories
Publication Information
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.
"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)
"Exquisite." —Daily Mail (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)
"Astonishing… perfect." —Prima (UK)
This information about So Late in the Day was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Claire Keegan was raised on a farm in Ireland. Her stories have won numerous awards and are translated into thirty languages. Antarctica won the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature and was a Los Angeles Times Book of the Year. 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 then the world's richest prize for a story. These works have been published in the New Yorker, Paris Review, Granta, and Best American Stories. Small Things Like These was a New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice and shortlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize, awarded for the finest book in any genre published in the English language. Foster is now part of the school syllabus in Ireland.
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