Together, this pair of Keegan's novellas pack a one-two punch. It is a beautiful companion to last year's Booker-shortlisted Small Things Like These, her Christmas story and morality tale that makes Dickens' Christmas Carol and Hans Christian Andersen's The Little Match Girl seem like glitter-dusted fairy tales. It appeared in a slightly abbreviated version in The New Yorker, but this new standalone volume is the first publication of the full text in the U.S. Since its original publication in 2010, Foster has become part of the school curriculum in her native Ireland. If she has published anything that isn't perfect, I haven't seen it. Keegan's output is scarce and her stories are as spare as they are heartrending, whittled down to the essential. She shares their keen sense of empathy, eye for the telling detail, and deep attunement to the moral issues raised by meanness and suffering for witnesses as well as the afflicted. Claire Keegan has been compared to the Russian author Anton Chekhov and fellow Irish writer William Trevor.
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