Many of the stories are about desire, infidelity, regret, often cautionary tales. “Love in the Tall Grass,” is about a love affair, too, and a break-up with an open ending. I liked several, including “Sisters,” “Quare Name for a Boy,” with its writer returning to her Irish rural roots: Claire Keegan: 'Short stories are limited. I'm cornered into writing what I can' Interview". The Guardian. 4 September 2010.

This writer is brilliant and the stories are surprising, unsettling, and for the most part dark. Women figure prominently in this collection, but with no heavy-handed feminist motifs that I could discern. Also, if you like neat, tidy, and generally upbeat endings you won't find them here! In fact, you won't find upbeat here at all. And, did I say unsettling? Many of the stories filled me with dread, worrying about what might happen next. At times I felt like I was standing at the edge of a precipice when suddenly the story ended and most of my fears were assuaged, if only because whatever I dreaded had been passed over. But sometimes the dread followed through (especially in the first story). The writing is beautiful, the stories are original and surreally realistic. This is the second book I've read by this author this month, I listened to audios of both and yet I also took out the ebooks and read. Although the narrators were excellent, I recommend reading over listening. Now, I will have to take a breather, but, in the future, I will definitely be looking for anything and everything published by this author.The characters in these unsettling tales are all damaged in some way. Broken marriages, grief, loneliness - these are some of the subjects that have emerged to upend their lives. Most of the stories are set in Ireland, and to be honest the few that take place elsewhere are a bit jarring. Keegan's writing feels much more natural and assured in her native land. Read it is a supernaturally delicious and almost illicit feeling that assails us from her stories, sometimes touching, or chilling where anonymous characters, even possessed by a "savage" behaviour, manage to awaken in us a powerful empathy, to the point that you kind of sympathise with them. The true figure of those held remains unknown but it is often said to be at least 10,000, though some have guessed the real figure may be as high as 30,000. Records from the laundries were deliberately destroyed, lost or made inaccessible by the church. While there, the women were forced to labour tirelessly, while suffering physical and mental abuse at the hands of the church.

Being clearly a superior writer Claire Keegan has a unique, natural and original voice. The discovery of her short stories (advised by my GR friend s.penkevich) was a truly pleasant surprise. They don’t know the half of it, don’t know the disguises I made for them, how I took 20 years off their hard-earned faces, washed the honey-blond rinses out of their hair, how I put them in another country and changed their names.”

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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. Keegan recasts the senior McGahern as The Sergeant, a belligerent Garda officer and veteran of the independence struggle. 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. Again, Keegan’s understanding of character results in a story where tiny, oblique moments are imbued with considerable meaning. The Sergeant, for example, derives a kind of mechanical comfort from inspecting his bicycle, a comfort which eventually replaces emotional engagement altogether. He must resist the urge to wind the chain until it seizes: the psychology of a man who can only give all or nothing, and can find no comfort on any middle-ground. His unwillingness to commit to a relationship is another facet of this, and the true fulcrum on which the story turns. Keegan’s ‘Surrender’ is more than a simple derivative of McGahern’s anecdote; it is a worthy and beautiful piece of art in itself, and one which speaks volumes in its silences alone. Irish author Claire Keegan nominated for prestigious Booker Prize". TheJournal. 7 September 2022 . Retrieved 9 September 2022. While I didn't rate this collection as high as Walk the Blue Fields: Stories, there are some stories here that I loved, particularly "Burns". And of course I absolutely loved "Walk..", so it is no insult to come in second. "Antarctica" was Keegan's debut collection and obviously spoke of much more to come. The sure narrative pace of Joyce Carol Oates, Alison Lurie or Rose Tremain is matched here in Keegan's most conventional short stories. In 'The Ginger Rogers Sermon', a spontaneous schoolgirl seduces her father's farm hand, Slapper Jim, and alone remains innocent of the consequences while the family dance a jig in the parlour. Her jaunty voice produces poignant effect. This and 'Men and Women', a colourful, melancholy study of family idiocy, must be among the finest contemporary stories written recently in English.As with Antarctica, it is the rich psychological realism of Keegan’s characters which propels these stories beyond simple aesthetic splendour. The first story, ‘The Parting Gift’, is told through eerie, second-person narration which allows simultaneously for emotional intimacy and for cold, detached objectivity on the part of the reader. The story, describing a teenage girl about to leave her family and embrace a new life beyond the uncertainty of emigration, presents the unsettling domesticity of abuse in rural Ireland via an effective slow-burn in which the potentialities of the unnamed girl are undermined utterly by her shrinking emotional horizons. Her Leaving Cert inability ‘to explain that line about the dancer and the dance’ reflects her own situation, caught between a grotesque inseparability of home and horror. Antarctica is her debut, a collection of stories first published in 1999. It is a little rough around the edges, true, but there are several moments of sheer brilliance - you are left in no doubt that this author has talent to burn. I put my left hand between my legs —not—to masturbate - some type of protection comfort - maybe — over my underwear. Keegan is measured and merciless as she dissects the silent acquiescence of a 1980s Irish town in the Church’s cruel treatment of unmarried mothers - and the cost of one man’s moral courage.