Product Description

A long-haired woman moves into the priest's house and sets fire to his furniture. That Christmas, the electricity goes out. A forester mortgages his land and goes off to a seaside town looking for a wife. He finds a woman eating alone in the hotel. A farmer wakes half-naked and realises the money is almost gone. And in the title story, a priest waits on the altar for a bride and battles, all that wedding day, with his memories of a love affair. In her long-awaited second collection, Claire Keegan observes an Ireland wrestling with its past.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #86686 in Books
• Published on: 2008-05-01
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 192 pages

Anne Enright, Guardian
'Perfect short stories.'

Guardian
'These are exquisite stories, so intricately wrought, so strange and beguiling as to entirely bewitch.'

Irish Times
'Keegan ... adds the timing of her masters, McGahern and Trevor to her imaginative realist's art.'

Customer Reviews

World class
Keegan's stories are beautifully honed and sparse. Her first collection, Antarctica, is good, but this collection propels her in to the big league. All the stories here are crafted masterfully and speak of damaged people and lives and loves lost or regained. I really think she is a world class short story writer who, on this evidence at least, belongs in the same company as Raymond Carver, or Alice Munro. The great Irish short story has found a huge new lease of life with Keegan's emergence.

A favorite book of mine.
I bought a copy about a year ago. I have read it a number of times since. It contains beautiful, authentic stories that manage to reveal the human condition without taking a bath in a pool of misery.

I loan out lots of my books, most never to be seen again :), but this one I will not part with, insisting my friends buy their own copy. Buy it, read it, enjoy it, keep it.

Exceptional
Beautifully written. Very well-crafted and honed prose. The stories simply sparkle and resonate in the memory. It's of little surprise that Ms Keegan is so successful in the prize winning stakes and deservedly so! The only reason I didn't give it a 5-star - I wasn't all that fond of one story "The Parting Gift" and its 2nd person narrative POV.