Clare Keegan’s Brilliance

By Claire Keegan

Walk the Blue Fields Published 2007 Read Aug 2023

Foster  Published 2010 Read June 2023

Small Things Like These Published 2021 Read June 2023

This reader discovered Claire Keegan by a well-trod route for this reader:  her book club. 

The author is an amazingly gifted who can tell a profound story in a few pages.  Each novella or story has left this reader sitting back to say “Wow” as the author provides so much punch in so few words.   So much told in a few pages and simultaneously so much left unsaid but known. 

Foster and Small Things Like These were the first works read by this reader and the focus of the book group.  Both were published as novellas. Walk the Blue Fields is a book of short stories this reader chose to share with a “book buddy” while driving about a thousand miles on a trip. 

Foster paints the story of a girl sent to live with a distant relative for a few months while her mother is giving birth to yet another baby.  We engage quickly with the girl and worry with her as she adjusts to living with her aunt and uncle.  We are thrilled as the three settle into a warm pseudo family unit for a brief few weeks and we are shattered with them when the girl’s father returns to retrieve her.

In Small Things Like These we walk with the protagonist and listen to his thoughts as he interacts with his family, employees, and customers on two days—Christmas Eve and Christmas Day.  We learn with him a secret from his past which, coupled with his already firm appreciation of his mother’s employer’s treatment of him, drives him to make a life-changing decision.  Two days and 128 pages packs a powerful punch for the protagonist and the reader. 

Walk the Blue Fields gives the reader seven stories that are often melancholic, sometimes about people who have lived through or are living through extremely difficult situations, and which are always rich and memorable.  My book buddy was about to cry “uncle” — enough sad stories when we listened to the last one.  Sad yes, absurd yes, and hysterical at the same time.  We both agreed we’d likely read more of this author. 

Claire Keegan is an Irish author whose work has won a number of awards.  She was inducted into Aosdana in 2008 (an Irish association or academy of artists, each of whom must have produced a distinguished body of work of genuine originality; membership is limited to 250)(1). 

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