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“... This year​ Claire Keegan, long esteemed, became fêted. Small Things like These has just won the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction and been longlisted for the Booker. Foster, published in 2010, has been filmed as The Quiet Girl. I shall not see it, at least not for a while; the words on the page are lodged in my head ...”

“... In the title story of Claire Keegan’s second collection, Walk the Blue Fields, a priest is officiating at a wedding in rural Ireland: the bride is late, the organist has to play the Bach toccata twice, ‘a thrill of doubt’ is ‘spreading through the pews’. She turns up eventually, and the ceremony goes off all right, but an intimation of trouble has been set reverberating in the reader from the very first sentence: ‘Earlier, the women came with flowers, each one a deeper shade of red ...”

“... the despoiling of a young girl’s first love, which seems to look forward to Edna O’Brien or Claire Keegan. Barbie is living one summer with her uncle, in a sensual dream of happiness, in love with him without knowing it. He sends her to pay a visit to his neighbour, a thwarted, fascinating, clever woman his own age, who also wants him; in a few ...”

“... title is taken from the famous swirling Kokoschka painting of himself in bed with Alma – Susanne Keegan presented Alma’s anti-Semitism as tangential to her personality: a ‘tasteless’ aberration. Keegan noted that she had many Jewish friends and treated Jewish men such as Schönberg and Mahler as ‘honorary ...”