Walk the Blue Fields - Paperback

by Claire Keegan (Author)

The second collection of "exquisite stories" (The Guardian) from the author of Small Things Like These, whose award-winning works of fiction have sold over two million copies worldwide

Winner of the prestigious Edge Hill Prize and the second story collection in Claire Keegan's bestselling body of work, Walk the Blue Fields was first published in 2007 to critical acclaim on both sides of the Atlantic. In "The Long and Painful Death," a writer awarded a stay to work in Henrich Böll's old cottage has her peace interrupted by an unwelcome intruder whose motive emerge as the night progresses. In the title story, a priest waiting to perform a marriage battles his memories of a lost love, an affair that made him question all to which he has dedicated his life.

A masterful portrait of a country wrestling with its past, Walk the Blue Fields is a breathtaking collection from one of the world's greatest fiction writers and a resounding articulation of all the yearnings of the human heart.

Author Biography

Claire Keegan's works of fiction are internationally acclaimed and have been translated into thirty 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--then the world's richest prize for a short story. Small Things Like These, one of the New York Times's 100 Best Books of the 21st Century and an Oprah's Book Club Pick, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the Rathbones Folio Prize and won the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction and The Kerry Prize for Irish Novel of the Year. So Late in the Day was longlisted for the Story Prize. She was awarded Woman of the Year for Literature in Ireland (2022), Author of the Year (2023), the Seamus Heaney Award for Arts and Letters, and the Siegfried Lenz Award (2024).