Walk the Blue Fields

AN IRISH TIMES TOP 100 IRISH BOOKS OF THE 21ST CENTURY 'Exquisite . so intricately wrought, so strange and beguiling as to entirely bewitch.' GUARDIAN 'Pure magic.' COLM TÓIBÍN 'Lyrical, thoughtful, but with a thick, dark strain of melancholy running through.' INDEPENDENT ON SUNDAY A longhaired 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 halfnaked 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 longawaited second collection, Claire Keegan observes an Ireland wrestling with its past.

Claire Keegan was brought up on a farm in Ireland. Her stories have won numerous awards and are translated into more than 20 languages. Foster was named by The Times as one of the top 50 novels to be published in the 21st Century. Keegan is now holding the Briena Staunton Fellowship at Pembroke College, Cambridge.

Walk the Blue Fields by Claire Keegan is the long awaited second collection from the Booker-shortlisted author of Small Things Like These.