Does any other writer do as much with as few words as Claire Keegan? Her three novellas - Foster, So Late in the Day and Small Things Like These - were among the reading highlights of 2023. Each ran only to a few dozen pages but delivered stories of incredible power and emotion in which not a single word was wasted. Small Things Like These, which at 128 pages is a veritable epic by the Irish writer's standards, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and many people's favourite.
Keegan made her name initially as a writer of short stories and Antarctica was her first published collection. The stories all come with the power of her later work and this is a fine, balanced collection of tales largely set across rural landscapes in Ireland, the UK and the US. Most feature strong and fearless women, many of whom are nevertheless forced to confront the imblance in power in their relationships with men.
The title story opens with a married woman travelling to a nearby town with her mind set on sleeping with another man for the first time. Its ending, even though it is signaled, comes as a punch to the guts and sets the pattern for a number of breathtakingly tense narratives that consider murder, kidnapping and other less ostentatious sins. It's not surprising the compilation, first published almost 25 years ago, lacks some of the polish of the later works, which flirt with perfection. But they do have an incredible raw energy as well as Keegan's searing insight into human beings, their relationships and their motives.
I devoured this brilliant collection in a little under 24 hours - Christmas and New Year is a good time for reading - and the first thing I did when I was finished was Google to see if there's any more where this came from. Her second collection Walk the Blue Fields beckons.