Walk the Blue Fields

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Keegan’s evocative prose takes you so far into each story that your senses buzz afresh with them.” – The List Th descriptions and characterizations in these stories all have elements of tragedy …. sadness that can turn skin blue. A collection of seven stories exploring themes of families, emotions, secrets, memories - not all of them welcome ones, and love that is taboo, morally, religiously as well as legally. Walk the Blue Fields may be among the best books you will read this year. . . . Keegan’s writing offers stark, intelligent flourishes and a look into the heart of rural Ireland, gurgling with desolate undercurrents.” –Vikram Johri, St. Petersburg Times

The land, which is a source of wealth and spirituality, also epitomizes duty, heritage and binding roots that imprison the main characters in the jail of their own resignation. And so they live with a conflicted sense of belonging that is naturally paired with alienation, which doggedly morphs them into natural exiles in their native country.These stories are pure magic. They add, using grace, intelligence and an extraordinary ear for rhythm, to the distinguished tradition of the Irish short story. They deal with Ireland now, but have a sort of timeless edge to them, making Claire Keegan both an original and a canonical presence in Irish fiction.”— Colm Tóibín, author of Brooklyn Praise for Antarctica: urn:lcp:walkbluefields0000keeg_b1e2:epub:3728d8ca-cfc0-4ba7-951b-a3e71e306eda Foldoutcount 0 Identifier walkbluefields0000keeg_b1e2 Identifier-ark ark:/13960/t41s54212 Invoice 1652 Isbn 9780571233069 A trio of brilliantly polished stories . . . In Keegan’s expert hands, even a minor skirmish—between a pushy older man and the writer who grudgingly lets him interrupt her solitude at an artist’s residency—illuminates how the sexes so often seem to navigate the world on completely different operating systems.” — People Magazine, Book of the Week A] stunning second collection . . . Keegan’s stories are the literary counterparts to Picasso’s Blue Period paintings. . . . Keegan’s first collection, Antarctica, led to comparisons with Raymond Carver, but Annie Proulx, with her distilled, poetic prose and attunement to remote landscapes, is a closer match.”—Heller McAlpin, San Francisco Chronicle

Keegan is the kind of writer whose spare, slippery work you want to reread . . . [her] sentences shape shift the second time ’round, twisting themselves into a more emotionally complicated story.” —NPR

Claire Keegan's brilliant debut collection, Antarctica, was a Los Angeles Times Book of the Year, and earned her resounding accolades on both sides of the Atlantic. Now she has delivered her next, much-anticipated book, Walk the Blue Fields, an unforgettable array of quietly wrenching stories about despair and desire in the timeless world of modern-day Ireland. In the never-before-published story “The Long and Painful Death,? a writer awarded a stay to work in Heinrich Böll's old cottage has her peace interrupted by an unwelcome intruder, whose ulterior motives only emerge as the night progresses. In the title story, a priest waits at the altar to perform a marriage and, during the ceremony and the festivities that follow, battles his memories of a love affair with the bride that led him to question all to which he has dedicated his life; later that night, he finds an unlikely answer in the magical healing powers of a seer. In all Claire Keegan’s stories, there is a family. The protagonist changes – the father, the mother, a son or daughter. But this figure never stands very far out in front. Instead, the narrative gains its emotional resonance from the dynamics between characters. Within these families there is cruelty and violence, as well as deep springs of affection. There is much left unspoken. “You have nothing to say to your mother. If you started, you would say the wrong things and you wouldn’t want it to end that way,” we learn of the protagonist in The Parting Gift, from Keegan’s second collection, Walk the Blue Fields (2007). In The Ginger Rogers Sermon, from her first, Antarctica (1999), the protagonist describes the trivial secrets they all keep from one another: “That’s the way it is in our house, everybody knowing things but pretending they don’t.” The first two tales in this collection are among the finest short fiction I have read in several years, which includes the new tales in John McGahern’s posthumous New and Selected Stories. That’s how good Keegan can be. The remarkable title tale follows a priest on the day of a wedding . . . “Parting Gift,” which opens the book, is a gem of compactness. . . . Its centre of gravity resonates with such force that the story could easily stretch to a novel.” –Tom Adair, The Scotsman