There are just two downsides to Claire Keegan. Available to view on Amazon Prime, it was nominated for an Oscar for Best International Feature Film. If you can’t stretch to reading the book – which would be rather feeble as it is only 88 pages long – don’t miss the very faithful film adaptation, An Cailin Ciuin. Meanwhile, Foster won the Davy Byrnes Award in 2009 and was selected last year as one of the top 50 works of fiction written this century.

Her most recent book, Small Things Like These, which is also a pleasure from start to finish, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Her first short-story collection, Antarctica, won the Rooney prize for Irish literature. Keegan can barely write a word without being wreathed in awards. Sure, the typically economic writing and plot – Keegan is no fan of plot – leave us with questions but time spent pondering them is a wonderful antidote to the pain of having finished the book. To read this heart-breaking tale is to journey through the complexities of all human emotion. Embedded now in their peaceful rhythm, will she find her place within her own family again when the time comes? Freshly baked rhubarb tart, milk in an enamel jug, a deep, hot, extravagant bath are just a few examples of the delicious welcome the girl receives, their homely comfort representing a life she’s never known.Īs the summer unfolds and she familiarises herself with her loving carers and their past, her world changes for good. It is the summer holidays in 1980s rural Ireland and a little girl is dropped off by her taciturn father to stay with relations while her mother has yet another baby in the chaotic family home.Įverything at the relatives’ house is clean, orderly, soft and generous. Evocative, lyrical and beautiful, it examines the ways we flawed humans express love to one another. Foster, her third book, began as a short story in The New Yorker in 2010 and was expanded and published later that year as a novella.

Books by claire keegan