“The thing about Irish author Claire Keegan is that she’s patient.

“Keegan publishes infrequently and when she does her books are short. But they’re far from slight. I’ve been re-reading her recent collection of three stories, ‘So Late in the Day,’ and marveling at the Chekhovian tension that permeates her unpretentious, unhurried language. She’s the heir to fellow Irish author William Trevor; she may well be better.

“So why is it so difficult for an author like Keegan to catch on in America? Even though ‘Foster,’ her quiet masterpiece, was a sensation in the UK in 2010, her U.S. publisher didn’t publish it until 12 years later, and only after her novella ‘Small Things Like These’ caught on, thanks in part, to its less-quiet and more-sensational subject matter: the abuses of the Catholic Church’s vicious Magdalene Laundries in circa-1985 Ireland. Only with that book did Keegan seem to finally arrive on our shores.

“‘So Late in the Day’ is a retrospective of sorts: it opens with the new title story and ends with ‘Antarctica,’ the title story of her 1999 debut collection. In between is ‘The Long and Painful Death,’ from her second story collection, 2007’s ‘Walk the Blue Fields’ — in this story, the best of the collection, a female writer’s residency in a cottage once owned by Nobel Prize-winning novelist Heinrich Böll is disturbed by the arrival of an oddly aggressive male academic.

“The title story of ‘So Late in the Day’ traces the implosion of a Dublin man on the cusp of middle age. It could cynically be read as a story of the moment, a literary telling of ‘The Making of a Misogynist.’ But Keegan’s better than that. She has a way at coming at her material from an unexpected and wholly enthralling angle — even with so much salacious factual material at hand for ‘Small Things Like These,’ Keegan comes at the church’s abuses from the edges inward, through the eyes of family man Bill Furlong, a coal merchant in a small Irish village in the weeks leading up to Christmas. Perspective, place and pace are everything in Keegan’s world.

“‘So Late in the Day’ has the most perfect last line — a paragraph long — that I can remember reading in a very long time. The line seems to prove that one can meander with utter clarity. Perhaps there’s something innately Irish about not being in a rush, about remaining calm amid uncertainty. If that’s true, Claire Keegan is the best Irish author of her generation.” — JOSH BODWELL, former executive director of Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance, current editorial director of Boston-based publisher Edward R. Godine

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