Walk the Blue Fields

This stunningly accomplished book locates her amongst the greatest practitioners of the short-story. -- Sunday Independent ― Joseph O'Connor

Keegan is a rarity: someone I will always want to read. -- Richard Ford ― Guardian 'Books of the Year'

Stunning . . . Keegan possesses enormous skill in telling a good story where the last few lines always leave you reeling. ― Irish Independent

Her stories are original, sometimes shocking, and always spot-on in the smallest details. The sheer skill on display (and indeed hidden from display) is breath-taking. ― Irish Times

Keegan's fiction makes most novels look too fancy; her short stories make most prose seem too plain. Her inner and outer landscapes, the palpable and the imagined, are all of a piece. You think you are just looking - it turns out you are travelling. ― London Review of Books

Immaculate structure, a lovely, easy flow of language, and a certain stony-eyed realism about human experience; she is very much part of an Irish tradition, but a unique craftswoman for all that. -- Hilary Mantel ― New Statesman 'Books of the Year'

[Keegan] is magnificent at capturing the rapturous, brimming vigour of the present and of nature. ― Observer

Like Chekhov, Keegan has the ability to sum up a life, or a significant chunk of one, in apparently trivial, quotidian events. ― Independent on Sunday

The best stories are so textured and moving, so universal but utterly distinctive, that it's easy to imagine readers savoring them many years from now. And to imagine critics, far in the future, deploying lofty terms to explain what it is that makes Keegan's work. ― New York Times

Simply put, Claire Keegan is one of the greatest fiction writers in the world. -- George Saunders