Claire Keegan Books In Order

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Publication Order of Short Stories/Novellas

Publication Order of Collections

Claire Keegan
Author Claire Keegan was born in the year 1968, and grew up on a farm in Wicklow, and is the youngest of a huge Catholic family. She traveled to New Orleans, at the age of seventeen and studied Political Science and English at Loyola University. She subsequently received an M.Phil in Trinity College Dublin.

In 1992 she returned to Ireland, and began writing in 1994, spending a year living in Cardiff. She took an MA in Creative Writing and taught undergraduates for one year at the University of Wales.

Claire has won the Rooney Prize for Literature, The William Trevor Prize, the Olive Cook Award, the Los Angeles Times Book of the Year, the Francis MacManus Award, and Davy Byrnes Irish Writing Award 2009. Her stories have been published in Granta, The New Yorker, Best American Short Stories, and The Paris Reviewer, and have been translated into twenty languages.

“Foster” was adapted into an acclaimed movie called “The Quiet Girl”, which was released in 2022.

“Antarctica” is the first short story collection and was released in 1999. This debut collection of short stories is a varied, often challenging, series of reflections on the violence, and drama, of everyday lives: the love affairs which tempt men and women, to leave their marriages, the uncanny effects of requited love, the cruel rivalry between sisters, and the common misery between men and women.

Every single time the happily married woman went away, she says in the titular story, she wondered about how it would feel to sleep with another guy. Taking her chance between eroticism and danger, she finds out. Does the au pair actually want to kill the baby? This is the question that drives “Where the Water’s Deepest”, while “Men and Women” gives voice to the desperation of being the “useful” kid to a father-tyrant: men “do nothing” at all in world in which daughter and mom do nothing except work.

One of the most disturbing tales in the collection, called “A Scent of Winter”, a story about rape and revenge, of keeping a white wife silent and waiting for a black man to heal. This grotesque hint is typical of how these stories work, and of the odd, sometimes ruthless, world into which they open.

“Walk the Blue Fields” is the second short story collection and was released in 2007. One long haired woman moves into the priest’s house and sets his furniture on fire. That Christmas, the electricity goes out. A forester mortgages his land and heads off to a seaside town looking to find a wife. He finds this woman eating by herself in a hotel. A farmer wakes up half-naked and realizes that the money’s almost run out.

A Harvard student flies south to celebrate his birthday at his stepdad’s condominium by the sea. As the scent of hay drifts up from the neighboring fields, a teen immigrant articulates the reason for her going. And in the title story, a priest waits on the altar for a bride and battles, that entire wedding day, with his memories about a love affair.

In Claire Keegan’s long awaited second collection, she observes an Ireland that’s wrestling with its past, and it’s against this landscape which the tales in the book so beautifully articulate all of the yearnings of the human heart.

“Foster” is the first stand alone novel and was released in 2010. It is a hot summer in rural Ireland. A kid gets taken by her dad to live with some relatives on a farm, not knowing when or even if she’ll get brought back home again.

In the Kinsellas’ household, she finds warmth and affection that she has not known and slowly but surely, in their care, soon begins blossoming. However there is something that is unspoken in this household, where everything is so well tended to, and this summer has to quickly come to an end.

The book won the prestigious Davy Byrnes Award where the award judge, Richard Ford, selected “Foster” as the winner, writing of Keegan’s “thrilling” instinct for the right words and her “patient attention to life’s finality and vast consequence. It tells the story of astonishing emotional depth, and showcases Claire Keegan’s great talent and secures her reputation as one of our most important storytellers.

“The Forester’s Daughter” is the first stand alone novella and was released in 2019. The evening’s just fine. Up in the sky a few early stars are shining of their own accord. She watches the dog, who licks the bowl clean. This dog is going to break her daughter’s heart, she is absolutely sure of it.

Claire’s mesmeric tale takes us into the heart of the Wicklow countryside, and of the farming family of Victor Deegan, with his ‘three teens, the milking, and the mortgage’.

Deegan finds a gun dog and gives it to his only daughter as a present, his wife is immediately filled with foreboding at this seeming act of kindness. While the seasons go by, some long buried family secrets threaten to emerge.

“Small Things Like These” is the second stand alone novella and was released in 2021. A story of one man’s bravery and a remarkable portrait of family and love.

The year is 1985 in a small Irish town. During the weeks leading up to Christmas, Bill Furlong, who’s a coal merchant and a family man faces into his busiest part of the year. Early one morning, as he’s delivering an order to the local convent, he discovers something which forces him to confront both his past and the complicit silences of a town that is controlled by the church.

This is a deeply affecting story about quiet heroism, hope, and empathy from one of our most critically lauded and iconic authors.

The novel has been shortlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize.

An electrifying and hypnotic Irish story which transcends country and transcends time. A story that reached so very deep that you can feel the characters moving around inside you. Claire’s delivered an unforgettable novel that’s a literary masterpiece and she is one of the world’s greatest living authors.