This is a story about liminal spaces: about having 'room, and time to think', about the shifting lines between secrecy and shame, and a child's burgeoning apprehension of the gap between what must be explicit and what need merely be implied. Antarctica won the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature. From the elements of this simple existence in an inconsequential town, Keegan has carved out a profoundly moving and universal story. During the weeks leading up to Christmas, Bill Furlong, a coal merchant and family man faces into his busiest season. Keegan’s Everyman hero is Bill Furlong, whose past and present she sketches with such crisp efficiency that the brush marks of her artistry are almost invisible.

Keegan's lyrical novella was originally a New Yorker short story, but it has gained greatly from this expansion: the narrative breathes along with the child slowly detaching from her cramped, impoverished home and starting to unfurl, leaf-like, in an atmosphere of attentiveness. Claire Keegans stories are translated into more than thirty languages. Small Things Like These is award-winning author Claire Keegans landmark new novel, a tale of one mans courage and a remarkable portrait of love and family It is 1985 in a small Irish town. Moreover, adults evince a concern for children beyond merely setting them to earn their keep, leaving our small visitor 'in a spot where I can neither be what I always am nor turn into what I could be'. In this strange new place vegetables grow in abundance, the cows are heavy with milk and the well never runs dry. A hot summer and a young, unnamed girl is taken to stay with an unfamiliar couple on a Wexford farm while at home her reluctantly pregnant mother makes ready for yet another mouth to feed. Foster Foster: Keegan, Claire: 9780802160140: : Books Skip to main content.

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