'For me, the fact that the story unfolds in summer was primarily a practical matter,' she says, smiling. It is a getting-of-wisdom story and one that illuminates the contrasting lives of the families, one struggling and overcrowded, the other contented but childless, the rural community that they live in and, by extension, Ireland itself.īlessedly, Keegan's Ireland is not the familiar land of misery, abuse and constant drizzling rain, but a place of community, common decency and, most surprising of all, sunshine. They are kind and caring, giving the girl the space to develop and feel valued. It doesn't have the pace of a novella.') Set in rural Wexford, it is narrated by a young girl who is fostered out to another family, the Kinsellas, by her father, for the summer months.

Keegan describes 'Foster' as a long short story. To try and explain a story is to run that kind of risk.' Then he tries to tell the other members of the battery what happened and he feels like a fool.

'I really think that story asks the question: what is the point in saying anything? The soldier is kissed. 'Do you know Chekhov's great story, 'The Kiss'?' she asks. The work, she insists, is its own explanation. At one point, she reprises the anecdote about Schumann being asked by a student to explain a difficult piece and, in response, sitting at the piano and playing it again. There is a definite sense that she would prefer not to have to comment on her work at all. Keegan is an exacting interviewee, cautious to the point of guarded. There are so many things the short story cannot do it's by learning those limitations that I am cornered into writing what I can.' To work on the level of suggestion is what I aim for in all my writing. 'It's essentially about trusting in the reader's intelligence rather than labouring a point.

'A lot of my work goes into taking any traces of my labours out,' says Keegan, when I talk to her in Edinburgh, a few hours after she gave a reading at the city's book festival.

Claire keegan book