Book Of The Month February 2024

Quizlit’s Book of the Month February 2024 is So Late in the Day by Claire Keegan. Her latest collection of short fiction features a trio of stories about love, lust, betrayal, and the ever-intriguing interchanges between women and men.

Book of the Month February 2024

So Late in the Day by Claire Keegan

Claire Keegan now gifts us three exquisite stories, newly revised and expanded, together forming a brilliant examination of gender dynamics and an arc from Keegan’s earliest to her most recent work.

In So Late in the Day, Cathal faces a long weekend as his mind agitates over a woman with whom he could have spent his life, had he behaved differently; in The Long and Painful Death, a writer’s arrival at the seaside home of Heinrich Böll for a residency is disrupted by an academic who imposes his presence and opinions; and in Antarctica, a married woman travels out of town to see what it’s like to sleep with another man and ends up in the grip of a possessive stranger.

Each story probes the dynamics that corrupt what could be between women and men: a lack of generosity, the weight of expectation, the looming threat of violence. Potent, charged, and breathtakingly insightful, these three essential tales will linger with readers long after the book is closed.

“Nothing short of a masterpiece.” —New York Times

“Each story is as substantive as a novel, and as breathtaking.” — San Francisco Chronicle

“A mini-masterpiece . . . There is nothing demonstrative about this prose, which is not spare but restrained, strategically discharging touches of eloquence only when needed, and not through a profusion of descriptive detail, but through choice adjectives and verbs that just stray from the literal . . . Keegan stands almost without rival.” — Irish Times

So Late in the Day by Claire keegan — Get a Copy

About the Author

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 — the world’s richest prize for a short story. Small Things Like These was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the Rathbones Folio Prize. It won the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction and The Kerry Prize for Irish Novel the year. She was awarded Woman of the Year for Literature in Ireland, 2022, and Author of the Year, 2023.