Antarctica

From the opening story about a married woman who takes a trip to the city with a single purpose in mind - to sleep with another man -
Antarctica draws you into a world of obsession, betrayal and fragile relationships. In 'House Calls', Cordelia wakes on the last day ofthe twentieth century and sets off along the coast road to keep a date with her lover that has been nine years in the waiting. In 'The Singing Cashier', a local postman visits two sisters bearing fishy gifts in the hope that his favour will be returned in kind. One of the most moving and disturbing stories in the collection, 'Passport Soup', features Frank Corso, who sits alone eating green tomatoes and bacon, mourning the disappearance of his nine-year-old daughter: 'At one point in that late evening, she was there, and then she wasn't.' Keegan's characters inhabit a world where dreams, memory and chance can have crippling consequences for those involved. Compassionate, witty and unsettling,
Antarctica is a collection to be savoured.

Claire Keegan's stories are translated into more than thirty-five languages. Antarctica won the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature. Walk the Blue Fields won the Edge Hill Prize for the finest collection of stories published in the British Isles. Foster won the Davy Byrnes Award and in 2020 was chosen by The Times as one of the top fifty works of fiction to be published in the twenty-first century. Small Things Like Thesewas shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the Rathbones Folio Prize, awarded for the best work of literature, regardless of form, to be published in the English language. It won the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year Award, the Ambassadors' Prize and the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction.