Where to start: Claire Keegan | Books

CShortlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize, Laire Keegan’s Small Things Like These is a fitting December read – a quiet but powerful book set in the run-up to Christmas and short enough to be read in moments between to read festivities. Once you’ve read it, you can also watch the newly released film adaptation, produced by and starring Cillian Murphy. And if you can’t get enough of Keegan’s razor-sharp fiction, there are plenty of other stories by the acclaimed Irish author to check out. Novelist Megan Nolan suggests some good starting points.

The entry point

A child narrator is one of the most difficult voices for an author to convincingly create. How can one achieve the necessary insight without falling into irritating precocity, or, worse, a voice of sweet naivety whose ignorance of the things it describes is supposed to give the story undeserved profundity? In Foster, Keegan is able to imbue her narrator with a natural alertness that is never at odds with the kind of language and observation inherent in childhood. It was first published as a short story in 2009 when it won the Davy Byrnes Short Story Award, later as a novella in 2022 when it was also made into a film. The events take place over a single summer in which a young girl leaves home in rural Wexford, where her mother is struggling with another unplanned pregnancy, and is cared for by a childless couple, John and Edna Kinsella. Keegan illuminates the subtler dignities of care and the indignities of absence and neglect, touching on small moments that a lesser writer wouldn’t bother to dwell on.

The one who stands out

Keegan’s short story “Surrender” is notable for being explicitly influenced by John McGahern, the other great Chekhovian chronicler of Irish rurality. In McGahern’s memoirs, we see his father – an abusive, tyrannical police officer – devour dozens of oranges at once, a final flamboyant gesture of self-indulgence (or is it self-punishment?) before he is forced to accept his girlfriend’s demand for marriage made from him. “Surrender” takes the same dark feast and elevates it to a deeply unsettling scene. Sean, the child of the shopkeeper from whom he buys the fruit, obviously covets his bounty. He intentionally stands in front of Sean and opens each orange with vivid, sensual pleasure, the better to taunt him. Again, it is Keegan’s keen sense of the rights and wrongs of children that makes this story so strange and moving.

The one that deserves more attention

The title story of Keegan’s second collection, Walk the Blue Fields, is a great example of her ability to render narratives that might be dismissed as tropes of the Irish provincial experience with such precision and apparent ease that they are incomparable to anything else. Here we have the story of a Catholic priest’s affair and his unwillingness to break the vow to be with his lover. When he is called upon to officiate the woman’s wedding, what unfolds is a painful, elegiac reflection on the joys and pains of memory and an amusingly observed insight into the sometimes strangely theatrical and routine verbal conventions of Irish social life.

The one you will learn from

Keegan’s entire body of work is characterized by its simplicity and brevity, but So Late in the Day might follow the simplest path of all, given what it is capable of conveying. The story came about, Keegan said in a Guardian interview, during a creative writing course she was teaching, as a hypothetical example of how a story with few overtly dramatic interventions can reveal its tension and power through seemingly unremarkable events. Cathal leaves his office in Dublin on a Friday evening and takes the bus home to avoid his phone and the consequences that await him there, the consequences of a relationship with his French fiancée Sabine. Titled Misogyny in the French translation, it is a startling revelation of a story that reveals a particular aspect of Irish men’s contempt for women.

The masterpiece

Since its release in 2021, I have observed Small Things Like These being given as a Christmas gift in Ireland and given to families over the holidays once a member has completed it. Given its length – the shortest book ever to compete for the Booker Prize – it has the pleasing advantage of being able to be read in one sitting. More importantly, it sets out in succinct but tender prose a crucial tension at the heart of Irish society, what Fintan O’Toole calls the “unknown knowns” – those parts of our history that have been hidden yet unacknowledged, including the brutal ones Institutions run by Irish society, state and church, around which this book revolves. Bill Furlong is a decent and contented family man, a coal merchant in New Ross, who can no longer turn away from the reality of the monastery on the outskirts of town when he meets a mad, suffering young woman in a shed who asks to meet the baby that was taken from her. On the one hand it is brutal about the complicity of ordinary people, but on the other hand it is also a particularly tender and hopeful Keegan work.

• A new gift edition of Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan is published by Faber (£12.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy from Guardianbookshop.com. Shipping costs may apply.