Walk the Blue Fields

Synopsis

In these quietly devastating stories, Claire Keegan captures the lives of people living in rural Ireland at moments when everything is about to change. A priest waits at the altar while memories of a lost love threaten to overwhelm him. A lonely farmer travels in search of a wife. A woman moves into a priest's house and upends the careful order of his life. Across these stories, longing, regret, desire, and unspoken grief simmer beneath the surface of ordinary days.

With remarkable economy and emotional precision, Walk the Blue Fields confirms Keegan as one of the finest short story writers of her generation. Her prose is spare but luminous, revealing entire lives through the smallest gestures and quietest conversations. These are stories of love, faith, isolation, and the hidden lives people carry, written with extraordinary compassion and restraint.

About the Author

Claire Keegan is an Irish writer whose fiction has earned international acclaim for its elegance, emotional depth, and extraordinary precision. She is the author of Small Things Like These, Foster, Antarctica, and So Late in the Day. Her work has won the Davy Byrnes Award, the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, and the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction, and has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize. She is widely regarded as one of the greatest living practitioners of the short story.

Publisher

Faber & Faber

Publication Date

May 1, 2008

Format

Paperback

Pages

183

Subjects

Short Stories · Irish Fiction · Literary Fiction · Rural Life · Contemporary Classics

ISBN

9780571233076