I had designated last weekend as my reading weekend for the book “So Late in the Day” by Claire Keegan. With no major plans, and an extra hour with the time change, it seemed like a good chunky reading time as I mentioned in my post here.

With the making of breakfast, a sick child, and the usual Saturday morning hustle…I was done with the book by 1 pm!

I was surprised so say the least!

The book is a collection of three short stories. Just like her novels So Late in the Day and Foster (both brilliant by the way), these stories are on the shorter side. 

To me Claire Keegan’s prose seems tight and contained. She conveys her message with just the right amount of words, and no more is needed.

There are no extra bits. No extraneous word.

And that is why she is able to tell a very complex story in such few pages. All of Claire Keegan’s works that I have read so far are character driven. They are sensitive to what the characters and thinking, and how they choose to express themselves. We know what they are seeing, what they are thinking about the world around them, what insecurities they are carrying around in every moment we are spending with them.

With such close shadowing of a character, it is hard not to feel closely with them. To get into the skin of the story from their perspective. To see their world.

I believe it is this closeness to the people in the story, with her tightly knit narrative that is the brilliance of Claire Keegan’s writing.

Every time they hesitate to do something, or disagree with someone, or try to judge others and themsleves, is  what we as humans feel in our navigating of the world every single moment. Claire Keegan is able to put every such nuance of human behavior into words.

She gives us characters who, even in their unusual plots and settings, are one of us. Their journey through their strange situations with us shadowing their very human thoughts makes reading her work a great experience for me. There is no big drama that happens. But humans move through their worlds. And we get to see them for who they are.

The three short stories in this collection are very different from each other. 

The first one told from a man’s perspective who is going about his day at work and then getting home. A mundane day from the sound of it, it gains significance as we find out more about what weight this day holds for him in what could have been, and how it all came to be.

The second story follows a woman around who is doing a writing retreat at a home designated for author residencies on her 39th birthday. Her encounter with a man who judges her for how she is spending her time there provides impetus for her work.

The third story was a big surprise in this collection as it was very different from the voice of Claire Keegan as I have known and expected it to be from my readings so far. This story is of a wife and mother who travels to a different city to look for sexual adventures with strangers on pretext of Christmas shopping for her family. Her encounter with a man that started out normal and romantic takes an extremely bizarre turn. And it takes the very last sentence to truly connect the story with it’s title “Antarctica”…this one was a big surprise in the collection for me.

I can’t wait to see what Claire Keegan writes next…

This Irish author is someone whose works I will be trying to get my hands on whenever I can.