Foster

Praise for Foster

"Foster confirms Claire Keegan's talent. She creates luminous effects with spare material, so every line seems to be a lesson in the perfect deployment of both style and emotion." -- Hilary Mantel"As good as Chekhov." -- David Mitchell"Foster puts on display an imposing array of formal beauties at the service of a deep and profound talent... She brings a thrilling synesthetic instinct for the unexpected right word, and exhibits patient attention to life's vast consequence and finality... a high-wire act of uncommon narrative virtuosity." -- Richard Ford

"A thing of finely honed beauty and cumulative power, a story that deals in suggestion, exactitude and telling detail." -- Observer

"It has beauty, harshness, menace, and the spine of steel worthy of high art . . . Keegan is a realist who has mastered describing the chaos of feeling." -- Irish Times

"A masterly combination of things pregnant and poised, frozen and in flux." ― Times Literary Supplement"Keegan has mastered a style that echoes Seamus Heaney's early poetry and the stories of William Trevor, but which has grown more enclosed and lyrical with each book. The dark humour of the early work has given way to a lush melancholy that has found its perfect length at 88 pages." ― Daily Telegraph"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." ― Guardian"Captivating...as lyrical as poetry yet so concentrated it's a novel in miniature. A real jewel." ― Irish Independent"A beautifully paced and delicately wrought tale... Claire Keegan has truly inhabited the mind of a child and crafted a story that will stay with you long after the final page has been read." ― Sunday Express"Subtly enlightening... seamlessly atmospheric." ― Irish Examiner"[Keegan] focuses on the eloquence of silence and the intimacy of wordless domesticity... the language is leanly evocative, its smallest details conveying reams about the girl's foster home, a place warm, gleaming and without children." ― Bloomberg"Foster will captivate you." -- Dazed and Confused

Praise for Small Things Like These

"For all her earlier accolades, Small Things Like These, Keegan's first novel, enters the world this month with the shocking force of a debut...Over what would amount to a couple of chapters in another novel, Keegan manages to place her characters and her readers at the center of an essential human dilemma: Will we turn a blind eye to evil in our midst, or will we take some action against it, even if it consists of just one small thing? As Keegan's concise, capacious new book demonstrates, little acts can lead to real change."--Los Angeles Times

"Keegan's precisely considered details about character, setting, memory, and dramatic moment create a story you will want to read again and again. Her deceptively simple language is pitch-perfect."--Boston Globe

"This exquisite miniature of a novel somehow defies the gravitational pull of its grim subject to hover in a quotidian, luminous present. Details materialize with preternatural clarity. The milky light of a winter afternoon, mist on a river, a woman opening an oven door, a child taking her father's hand: We see these things and feel their lingering presence as we are drawn into the life of an unassuming man in an unremarkable place."--The Wall Street Journal

"Claire Keegan...now gives us her best work yet. Small Things Like These is a short, wrenching, thoroughly brilliant novel mapping the path of one man's conscience, its torment and vacillation between two courses of action. Either one bears a price...Spare and potent, this is a remarkable story." --Minneapolis Star Tribune

"A sparse, breathtaking perfect gem of a novel."--People

"Small Things Like These is a gem of a slim novel about a family man faced with a moral decision... a deeply moving tale."--Associated Press

"Keegan captured and affected my whole attention. She draws a web of complicity around the convent's activities that is chillingly mundane and brutally true. These kinds of places existed not just because of the cruelty of the people who ran them, but also because of the fear and selfishness of those who were willing to ignore them. Stunning. Just stunning."--Catherine Whelan, NPR

A story that reached so deep I felt the characters moving around inside me. This unforgettable novel is a literary masterpiece and Claire Keegan is one of the world's greatest living writers." --Simon van Booy, author of Night Came with Many Stars

"Small Things Like These is a hypnotic and electrifying Irish tale that transcends country, transcends time. Claire Keegan's sentences make my heart pound and my knees buckle and I will always read everything she writes."--Lily King, author of Writers & Lovers

"In Small Things Like These, Claire Keegan creates scenes with astonishing clarity and lucidity. This is the story of what happened in Ireland, told with sympathy and emotional accuracy. From winter skies to the tiniest tick of speech to the baking of a Christmas cake, Claire Keegan makes her moments real--and then she makes them matter."--Colm Tóibín, author of The Magician

"Small Things Like These is not just about Ireland, it's about the world, and it asks profound questions about complicity, about the hope and difficulty of change, and the complex nature of restitution... A single one of Keegan's grounded, powerful sentences can contain volumes of social history. Every word is the right word in the right place, and the effect is resonant and deeply moving."--Hilary Mantel, author of The Mirror and the Light

"A book that makes you excited to discover everything its author has ever written... Absolutely beautiful."--Douglas Stuart, author of Shuggie Bain

"Marvellous -- exact and icy and loving all at once."--Sarah Moss, author of Ghost Wall

"A true gift of a book... Reading it brings a sublime Chekhovian shock."--Andrew O'Hagan, author of Be Near Me