Walk the Blue Fields by Claire Keegan is the long awaited second collection from the Booker-shortlisted author of Small Things Like These.
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.
'Impressive ... [Keegan] is magnificent at capturing the rapturous, brimming vigour of the present and of nature.'
-- Observer - Paperback of the Week
'Keegan ... adds the timing of her masters, McGahern and Trevor to her imaginative realist's art.' -- Irish Times
'Like Chekhov, Keegan has the ability to sum up a life, or a significant chunk of one, in apparently trivial, quotidian events.' -- Independent on Sunday
'Perfect short stories.' -- Anne Enright, Guardian
'These are exquisite stories, so intricately wrought, so strange and beguiling as to entirely bewitch.' -- Guardian
