They make this an annoyingly arty book, hiding more than not behind Hemingwayesque time-signatures and puerile repetitions about war (and memory and everything else, for that matter) being hell and heaven both. Stories of laundries persist in media and the arts, with many more books, plays and screen adaptions of the women’s stories. Like those in Walk the Blue Fields, the tragedy in Foster, first published in the New Yorker in 2010 and expanded into a short novel later that year, has already happened, its shape submerged just beneath the events of the narrative. Meanwhile, in what is destined to become one of the collection’s most treasured novelties, Keegan acknowledges her stylistic debt to McGahern by fictionalising an incident from his 2005 Memoir.

Foster is hard to find but is enjoying a new publication by Grove Press and can be found on NetGalley. Keegan’s characters inhabit a world where dreams, memory, and chance can have crippling consequences for those involved. This, her debut collection of short stories, was filled with the same beautiful prose and healthy dose of longing that weaves its way through everything I’ve read of hers thus far. So when I saw this title by Claire Keegan, an author that seems to be well-liked by my friends here, I decided it would fit into my little theme. And one story (which should perhaps have been cut for the American edition) begins, ''Tonight he is out on the balcony, his dark tan stunning against the white of his dress shirt,'' and continues, teetering into the comic: ''Many days have passed since he left Cambridge, Massachusetts, to spend time at his mother's penthouse on the coast.In “Passport Soup,” Frank Corso mourns the curious disappearance of his nine-year-old daughter and tries desperately to reach out to his shattered wife who has gone mad with grief. Keegan recasts the senior McGahern as The Sergeant, a belligerent Garda officer and veteran of the independence struggle.

I always thought hell would be an unbearably cold place where you stayed half frozen but you never quite lost consciousness and you never really felt anything,” she said. For all of this, however, it is the brilliantly rendered dinner scene which makes ‘Walk the Blue Fields’ one of the gems of this collection, particularly in terms of the interplay among the wedding guests and in lines such as ‘the priest cuts into the lamb’, which betray a knowing irony in light of the character’s inability to uphold his oath of celibacy. The stories are often dark and enveloped in a palpable atmosphere, and the reader feels that something big is going on in each of these carefully sculpted tales. Indeed, while on the surface ‘Walk the Blue Fields’ appears to present us with a clash of the old and the new Irelands, closer examination reveals it to be quite a traditional story.In Walk the Blue Fields, “A pale cloud was splitting in the April sky”, as the priest of the parish prepares to minister the marriage of the only woman he has ever loved. After he visits the laundry, a woman who runs the cafe warns Furlong about what he has seen there: ‘ Tis no affair of mine, you understand, but you know you’d want to watch over what you’d say about what’s there?

None of his colleagues can compare with the men whom The Sergeant fought alongside against the British, and the dissatisfaction created by this infects every aspect of his life. Brady, its protagonist, is a twenty-something farmhand, wallowing in self-hatred and self-denial after ‘the woman’ dispenses with his rural passive-aggressiveness. She dressed up in the afternoon, put on a short plum-colored dress, high heels, her darkest lipstick, and walked back into town.His endless quest to win back the deed from the bank slowly isolates him from others, isolating his resentful wife by proxy. In her note on the text, Keegan explains that the Magdalene laundries, where an estimated 30,000 Irish women were incarcerated between the 18th and 20th centuries, were “run and financed by the Catholic Church in concert with the Irish state”.

All used books might have various degrees of writing, highliting and wear and tear and possibly be an ex-library with the usual stickers and stamps. In the heat of July and early August, I’m often drawn to stories set in frigid climates, believing they will help dull that sense of lethargy and invigorate the spirit a bit. A jukebox song, “The Ballad of Lucy Jordan,” lured her into a pub, a converted prison with barred windows and a low, beamed ceiling. The terrible conditions they are forced to live under are at last confirmed when Furlong discovers a girl locked away in the convent’s coal house, distressed, barely able to walk and asking to see her baby.It started out as a short story told from the point of view of a boy who accompanies his father to deliver a load of coal and finds another boy, much his own age, locked up in the coal shed at a boarding school. We accompany Furlong, and we feel - and fear - for him as he realises what is happening, decides how he must in conscience act, and accepts what that action, in a small church-dominated town, will cost him, his wife and his children. Surrender’ derives from John McGahern’s recollection of his father telling him how, before getting married, he brought two dozen oranges to a park bench and ate them in a row. An endearing romance of a kind, ‘Night of the Quicken Trees’ traces the tentative relationship between Margaret, a healer, and Stack, a bedraggled turf-man with no one but Josephine, his goat, for company. I see now that I neglected to mention that this book is currently available in both ebook and audio on HOOPLA, if your library subscription includes.