Tag: Short Novel

So Late in the Day – book review

So Late in the Day, by Claire Keegan

Cathal is one of those blokes a friend might go out with and say, you know, he’s OK. He’s got a job, not bad looking. We meet Cathal looking out of his office window where the day is good: sunshine; birds; the smell of cut grass; “so much of life carrying smoothly on, despite the tangle of human upsets and the knowledge of how everything must end.” Cathal is writing rejection letters for bursary applicants. And there we have it, Keegan gives us the heads up that this is not a happily-ever-after. In this poignant novella, the fact that Cathal is not one of life’s winners is revealed through the world around him.

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Small Things Like These – book review

Small Things like These, by Claire Keegan

The Magdalen laundries, tool of the Catholic Church and Irish state, was closed down in 1996, in abject disgrace. In 2013 the Irish government gave a much belated apology to the women who had suffered in these prisons of forced labour. Women who had ‘fallen’ and needed to be removed from society. Some thirty thousand women are estimated to have been incarcerated, their babies adopted out. A shocking number of babies died.

Fallen. That word. Young women ‘fell’ pregnant. Their fault for being a bit clumsy, tripping up because they weren’t paying attention.

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