So Late in the Day: Stories of Women and Men

From Booker Prize Finalist and bestselling author of “pitch perfect” (Boston Globe) Small Things Like These, comes a tryptic of stories about love, lust, betrayal, and the ever-intriguing interchanges between women and men.

Celebrated for her powerful short fiction, considered “among the form’s most masterful practitioners” (New York Times), 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.

About the Author

Claire Keegan’s stories are translated into thirty languages. Antarctica won the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature. Walk the Blue Fields won the Edge Hill Prize, awarded to the best collection of stories published in the British Isles. Foster won the Davy Byrnes Award, one of the richest literary prizes in the world, and was last year chosen by The Times as one of the top fifty works of fiction to be published in the twenty-first century. Small Things Like These was shortlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize, and for the Rathbones Folio Prize, awarded for the best work of literature, regardless of form, to be published in the English language, and won the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year Award and the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction.