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 bearingfishy 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 thirty languages.
Antarctica won the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature.
Walk the Blue Fields won the Edge Hill Prize, awarded to the best collection of stories published in the British Isles.
Foster won the Davy Byrnes Award, one of the richest literary prizes in the world, and was last year chosen by
The Times as one of the top fifty works of fiction to be published in the twenty- first century.
Small Things Like These was shortlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize, and for the Rathbones Folio Prize, awarded for the best work of literature, regardless of form, to be published in the English language, and won the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year Award and the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction.