Walk the Blue Fields

Walk the Blue Fields by Claire Keegan is the long awaited second collection from the Booker-shortlisted author of Small Things Like These.



A long-haired woman moves into the priest's house and sets fire to his furniture. That Christmas, the electricity goes out. A forester mortgages his land and goes off to a seaside town looking for a wife. He finds a woman eating alone in the hotel. A farmer wakes half-naked and realises the money is almost gone. And in the title story, a priest waits on the altar for a bride and battles, all that wedding day, with his memories of a love affair. In her long-awaited second collection, Claire Keegan observes an Ireland wrestling with its past.



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 finest 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 the 2022 Rathbones Folio Prize, awarded for the finest 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.