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Foster Hardcover – November 1, 2022
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An international bestseller and one of The Times’ “Top 50 Novels Published in the 21st Century,” Claire Keegan’s piercing contemporary classic Foster is a heartbreaking story of childhood, loss, and love; now released as a standalone book for the first time ever in the US
It is a hot summer in rural Ireland. A child is taken by her father to live with relatives on a farm, not knowing when or if she will be brought home again. In the Kinsellas’ house, she finds an affection and warmth she has not known and slowly, in their care, begins to blossom. But there is something unspoken in this new household—where everything is so well tended to—and this summer must soon come to an end.
Winner of the prestigious Davy Byrnes Award and published in an abridged version in the New Yorker,this internationally bestselling contemporary classic is now available for the first time in the US in a full, standalone edition. A story of astonishing emotional depth, Foster showcases Claire Keegan’s great talent and secures her reputation as one of our most important storytellers.
- Print length128 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherGrove Press
- Publication dateNovember 1, 2022
- Dimensions5.5 x 0.75 x 7.75 inches
- ISBN-10080216014X
- ISBN-13978-0802160140
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SMALL THINGS LIKE THESE | WALK THE BLUE FIELDS | ANTRACTICA | |
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Customer Reviews |
4.4 out of 5 stars
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4.4 out of 5 stars
1,387
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4.3 out of 5 stars
612
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Price | $12.39$12.39 | $11.50$11.50 | $14.14$14.14 |
Short-Listed for the 2022 Booker Prize. A tale of one man’s courage and a remarkable portrait of love and family. | An unforgettable array of quietly wrenching stories about despair and desire in the timeless world of modern-day Ireland. | Compassionate, witty, and unsettling, the debut collection of one of Ireland’s most exciting and versatile new talents. |
Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com Review
Review
A Best Book of the Year from NPR, New York Public Library, Electric Lit and PBS Newshour
A New York Times Editors’ Choice
A Best Book of November from TIME and Washington Post
“Claire Keegan’s beautiful new novella, Foster, is no less likely to move you than any heaping 400-page tome you’ll read this year… Keegan’s novella is a master class in child narration. The voice resists the default precociousness, and walks the perfect balance between naïveté and acute emotional intelligence… Like a great, long Ishiguro novel, Keegan makes us complicit in what her characters want, setting us up for utter heartbreak when they don’t get it.” ― New York Times
“Keegan’s work takes me back to when I first experienced the palpable thrill of entering an author’s world. Her sentences are so artfully honed but so free of artifice they feel as rough and verdant as sprigs of fresh heather…I don’t want to say anything more about Foster, except ‘Read it.’” ― Ron Charles, Washington Post Book Club
“Keegan's output is scarce and her stories are as spare as they are heartrending, whittled down to the essential. If she has published anything that isn't perfect, I haven't seen it… More than most books four times its size, Foster does several of the things we ask of great literature: It expands our world, diverting our attention outward, and it opens up our hearts and minds. This is a small book with a miraculously outsized impact.” ― NPR
“Foster is exactly as sad as you imagine it would be, but more stunningly alive than you have any right to expect. Its language settles in your belly and then your bones only seconds after it has passed your eyes… Keegan’s world is lush and full, the details delicately made, ever more rewarding and engaging with every read… While the scale of her story is modest ― this one small girl, this short stretch of time ― the scope of what Keegan can hold inside of it ― the ache of living, the flash of seeing finally what we don’t have, the mourning for all we’ll never be ― is as big, brash and ambitious as a story might be.” ― Los Angeles Times
“Enchanting… a study of familial heartache and generosity.” ― Washington Post
“The austere style and measured pacing of “Foster” is perfect… [A] matchless novella.” ― Wall Street Journal
“Balancing Keegan’s delicate, sparing prose and masterful ear for dialogue with a tale that is almost overwhelming in its tenderness, Foster is a heart-wrenching treasure of a book that only serves to confirm Keegan’s place as one of contemporary Irish literature’s leading lights.” ― Vogue, The Best Books to Read this Fall
“There are in this story, as in all of Claire Keegan's work, layers of nuance and resonance. Every detail has bearing, some quietly salient, others possessing a delayed charge, so that, again and again, the reader feels the sharp thrill of comprehension. A stray heifer, a light at sea, that joke understood, all pregnant tokens of a fully realized universe of feeling. Keegan is the finest writer at work in Ireland today and this brilliant little book is further proof of it.” ― Minneapolis Star Tribune
“Foster is an exquisite, tender, and heart-expanding tale, as Keegan creates more magic in 128 pages than others could make in 928 pages.” ― Amazon Book Review“An immensely powerful snapshot novel…this work mines the recesses of human fragility with a compassionate and deft pen, its combination of simple language and sweeping empathy landing with the force of a saga…a rich, compassionate work.” ― Library Journal (starred review)
“Pristine… Both concise and gut-wrenching. [Keegan’s] superficially simple prose persuasively conveys a child’s sometimes-innocent but always careful and insightful observations of the world…A heartbreaking but deeply humane story about parents and children.” ― Kirkus, starred review
“A gem of a book, to be savored again and again.” ― Booklist, starred review
“Foster confirms Claire Keegan’s talent. She creates luminous effects with spare material, so every line seems to be a lesson in the perfect deployment of both style and emotion.” ― Hilary Mantel
“As good as Chekhov.” ― David Mitchell
“An exquisitely balanced book about a child sent to stay with relatives for the summer. Keegan is a devastatingly economic writer: all the silent spaces of the novel will break your heart.” ― Maggie O’Farrell
“Foster puts on display an imposing array of formal beauties at the service of a deep and profound talent… She brings a thrilling synesthetic instinct for the unexpected right word, and exhibits patient attention to life’s vast consequence and finality… a high-wire act of uncommon narrative virtuosity.” ― Richard Ford
“A thing of finely honed beauty and cumulative power, a story that deals in suggestion, exactitude and telling detail.” ― Observer
“It has beauty, harshness, menace, and the spine of steel worthy of high art . . . Keegan is a realist who has mastered describing the chaos of feeling.” ― Irish Times
“A masterly combination of things pregnant and poised, frozen and in flux.” ― Times Literary Supplement
“Keegan has mastered a style that echoes Seamus Heaney's early poetry and the stories of William Trevor, but which has grown more enclosed and lyrical with each book. The dark humour of the early work has given way to a lush melancholy that has found its perfect length at 88 pages.” ― Daily Telegraph
“Keegan's lyrical novella was originally a New Yorker short story, but it has gained greatly from this expansion: the narrative breathes along with the child slowly detaching from her cramped, impoverished home and starting to unfurl, leaf-like, in an atmosphere of attentiveness.” ― Guardian
“Captivating…as lyrical as poetry yet so concentrated it's a novel in miniature. A real jewel.” ― Irish Independent
"A beautifully paced and delicately wrought tale... Claire Keegan has truly inhabited the mind of a child and crafted a story that will stay with you long after the final page has been read.” ― Sunday Express
“Subtly enlightening… seamlessly atmospheric.” ― Irish Examiner
"[Keegan] focuses on the eloquence of silence and the intimacy of wordless domesticity... the language is leanly evocative, its smallest details conveying reams about the girl's foster home, a place warm, gleaming and without children." ―Bloomberg
“Foster will captivate you.” ― Dazed and Confused
Praise for Small Things Like These
“For all her earlier accolades, Small Things Like These, Keegan’s first novel, enters the world this month with the shocking force of a debut…Over what would amount to a couple of chapters in another novel, Keegan manages to place her characters and her readers at the center of an essential human dilemma: Will we turn a blind eye to evil in our midst, or will we take some action against it, even if it consists of just one small thing? As Keegan’s concise, capacious new book demonstrates, little acts can lead to real change.”―Los Angeles Times
“Keegan’s precisely considered details about character, setting, memory, and dramatic moment create a story you will want to read again and again. Her deceptively simple language is pitch-perfect.”―Boston Globe
“This exquisite miniature of a novel somehow defies the gravitational pull of its grim subject to hover in a quotidian, luminous present. Details materialize with preternatural clarity. The milky light of a winter afternoon, mist on a river, a woman opening an oven door, a child taking her father’s hand: We see these things and feel their lingering presence as we are drawn into the life of an unassuming man in an unremarkable place.”―The Wall Street Journal
“Claire Keegan…now gives us her best work yet. Small Things Like These is a short, wrenching, thoroughly brilliant novel mapping the path of one man's conscience, its torment and vacillation between two courses of action. Either one bears a price…Spare and potent, this is a remarkable story.” ―Minneapolis Star Tribune
“A sparse, breathtaking perfect gem of a novel.”―People
“Small Things Like These is a gem of a slim novel about a family man faced with a moral decision… a deeply moving tale.”―Associated Press
“Keegan captured and affected my whole attention. She draws a web of complicity around the convent’s activities that is chillingly mundane and brutally true. These kinds of places existed not just because of the cruelty of the people who ran them, but also because of the fear and selfishness of those who were willing to ignore them. Stunning. Just stunning.”―Catherine Whelan, NPR
A story that reached so deep I felt the characters moving around inside me. This unforgettable novel is a literary masterpiece and Claire Keegan is one of the world's greatest living writers." ―Simon van Booy, author of Night Came with Many Stars
"Small Things Like These is a hypnotic and electrifying Irish tale that transcends country, transcends time. Claire Keegan’s sentences make my heart pound and my knees buckle and I will always read everything she writes."―Lily King, author of Writers & Lovers
“In Small Things Like These, Claire Keegan creates scenes with astonishing clarity and lucidity. This is the story of what happened in Ireland, told with sympathy and emotional accuracy. From winter skies to the tiniest tick of speech to the baking of a Christmas cake, Claire Keegan makes her moments real―and then she makes them matter.”―Colm Tóibín, author of The Magician
“Small Things Like These is not just about Ireland, it’s about the world, and it asks profound questions about complicity, about the hope and difficulty of change, and the complex nature of restitution… A single one of Keegan’s grounded, powerful sentences can contain volumes of social history. Every word is the right word in the right place, and the effect is resonant and deeply moving.”―Hilary Mantel, author of The Mirror and the Light
“A book that makes you excited to discover everything its author has ever written… Absolutely beautiful.”―Douglas Stuart, author of Shuggie Bain
“Marvellous ― exact and icy and loving all at once.”―Sarah Moss, author of Ghost Wall
“A true gift of a book… Reading it brings a sublime Chekhovian shock.”―Andrew O’Hagan, author of Be Near Me
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 of the Year. She was awarded Woman of the Year for Literature in Ireland, 2022, and Author of the Year, 2023.
Product details
- Publisher : Grove Press (November 1, 2022)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 128 pages
- ISBN-10 : 080216014X
- ISBN-13 : 978-0802160140
- Item Weight : 7.7 ounces
- Dimensions : 5.5 x 0.75 x 7.75 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #6,065 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #252 in Coming of Age Fiction (Books)
- #307 in Family Life Fiction (Books)
- #799 in Literary Fiction (Books)
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The Kinsellas are at once kind and open, offering kindnesses the girl has never known: warmth that comes with a held hand, love shown in a hot bath, trust demonstrated in things both said and unsaid.
And as the summer continues, she comes to understand that affection can be part of love, and the Kinsellas give her that, too, among other things like books and clothes and hot meals.
But there’s something unsaid in the house and summers must end.
At 90ish pages, this is something that can be read and savored in one afternoon. It’s heartbreakingly beautiful. Lyrical like poetry, sparse but rich. Simply beautiful.
Everyone should find a copy and read it.
The Kinsellas are at once kind and open, offering kindnesses the girl has never known: warmth that comes with a held hand, love shown in a hot bath, trust demonstrated in things both said and unsaid.
And as the summer continues, she comes to understand that affection can be part of love, and the Kinsellas give her that, too, among other things like books and clothes and hot meals.
But there’s something unsaid in the house and summers must end.
At 90ish pages, this is something that can be read and savored in one afternoon. It’s heartbreakingly beautiful. Lyrical like poetry, sparse but rich. Simply beautiful.
Everyone should find a copy and read it.
It’s a story that unfurls itself slowly and patiently, running parallel to the changes that happen to the young girl as she begins to grow into the space created by two loving foster parents. In a short span, we watch from the girl’s perspective the change that takes place while she soaks up for the first time the kind of attention a child should receive. We see this in juxtaposition to her father, who drops her off at the foster home in the very first scene and departs cleanly as though he’s dropped her off at a playdate.
Keegan’s writing is subtle and suggestive. We never learn too much at once, which allows us to sit with the moments longer and learn what is being revealed in each sentence and paragraph. As an adult reader, you want to race ahead to connect the dots. After all you can see things and put pieces together than the girl as of yet cannot. But it doesn’t take long to realize the value is in being patient and allowing yourself to get absorbed into the girl’s perspective. The best parts of the writing are these little moments where you realize the girl is starting to form meaning around what is happening to her. There’s something profound about the act of childhood development that is shown through the scenes and the story itself. It’s a lovely story that manages to provoke as much thought and emotion by what it doesn’t say.
Top reviews from other countries
Much has already been written about the impressively high literary quality and the extraordinary art of storytelling - here I would like to shed light on the spiritual aspect of the little book:
In my opinion, the secret of the tale lies in the fact that it subtly describes a spiritual and mystical experience or, in Christian terminology, the return home to God the FATHER. And the reader is imperceptibly taken on this excursion into another dimension - and at the end dropped back into their usual reality; but enriched and stimulated by the experience.
The child, a child of the FATHER (God) like all of us, lives in a world of suffering, lack, effort, lovelessness and lies. Now it gets to know a completely different way of BEING; it makes the experience of love, abundance, lightness and truthfulness - of Heaven.
To clarify, here is a selection of incidents in the story that have a deeper meaning:
• At the beginning we read that the biological father lost a heifer in a game - a young animal that actually belongs to a herd. The father is a bad shepherd.
Later in the book, a stray heifer appears again and “panics and finally races past us.” Kinsella’s cattle are different: “On a strip of land, tall Frisian cows stand all around us, grazing. Some of them look up as we pass, but not one of them moves away. They have huge bags of milk and long teats.” Mr Kinsella is a good shepherd.
• When she arrives, the girl sees herself ‘wild like a gypsy child’: homeless, neglected, poor. But now she is entering a new, completely different home: “Here there is room, and time to think. There may even be money to spare.”
• Mrs Kinsella invites her in with the words: “Come on in, leanbh…” Leanbh is used in Gaelic for baby: a (new) birth.
Later, Mr Kinsella's nickname for the girl is "petal": symbolism for spiritual blossoming.
• As the biological/worldly father forgets to unload the girl's suitcase, she has to take off her old clothes (her old self). The girl takes a hot bath and is washed: (ritual) cleansing and a new beginning.
• “… There is a big double bed there… I know that’s where they sleep, and for some reason I’m happy that they sleep in the same bed.”: The foster parents are ONE made up of the male and female principles. It is a realm of nonduality.
• The first excursion goes across the meadows to the fountain. (Psalm 23: “He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters.”) The foster parents drink from the spring; fresh pure water - symbols of the origin and preservation of life, blessing. “This water is cool and clean as anything I have ever tasted...” And there is always plenty of this water in this well, even if dryness and drought prevail in the other reality.
• Some words about the symbolism of the father: Mr Kinsella represents the FATHER. This becomes particularly clear when the take the walk on the beach:
He takes the child by the hand, carries her, hugs her, lights the way, tells her: "Don't be afraid." He tells the story of the colt that, exhausted and almost dead, was fished out of the sea by a fisherman and came back to life. In my opinion, there is an analogy here to the biblical term 'fisher of men': we too can be saved from our confusion, awakened from our exhaustion and lethargy.
The book is full of metaphors of this kind; a list of all the examples and their interpretation would go beyond the scope of this review. And I would also like to follow Kinsella's advice to say only what is necessary - an art that the girl also learns ("...I have learned enough, grown enough, to know that what happened is not something I need ever mention. ») and which Claire Keegan herself, of course, masters excellently.
But perhaps this selection of examples can encourage you to pick up the book again and read it slowly and carefully, sentence by sentence, word by word, with this point of view of a spiritual experience and thus discover subtle detail by detail and answer for yourself what the fall into the well symbolizes, who or what the third light is about and what the deceased son could be about.
I wish you a lot of joy with it. May we all find ourselves back in the arms of the FATHER in the end. Run!
A personal note: I myself am not on the Christian-mystical path - so I don't want to represent this path in any proselytizing way - but I am familiar with its symbolism. And spiritual experiences, mystical experiences - a dwelling in ONENESS - are ultimately identical in all traditions.
I struggled for some time with the question of whether it would be somewhat counterproductive to reveal the secret of this little book. But it seems to me more urgent than ever that we children of men must clearly recognize what we actually long for in all our -ultimately futile- efforts for happiness.
Foster is another novella set in Ireland and was recommended to me by a friend whose reading choices I admire.
The book has 88 pages split into 8 chapters and printed using a large font (it doesn't take long to read!)
The size of the novella gives a feel that every word matter and has been carefully chosen for it's purpose - the result is a rich piece of writing which is a joy to read.
I thought that this sits somewhere between a book and a poem with a touching story at it's centre written in a lyrical style.
The child narrated the story of her experience - she is young and tells us only what she sees. The inner strength comes from what is not said and the reader gradually learns more as the hidden stories are allowed to develop. The people in this book say what is necessary but mean so much more. Gradually we get more understanding about the child and her immediate future.
The ending is powerful with a combination of emotions that is very challenging to portray in so few words.